IJCAI 2024 Papers

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the task of predicting students' future performance based on their historical learning interaction data. With the rapid advancement of attention mechanisms, many attention based KT models are developed. However, existing attention based KT models exhibit performance drops as the number of student interactions increases beyond the number of interactions on which the KT models are trained. We refer to this as the length generalization of KT model. In this paper, we propose stableKT to enhance length generalization that is able to learn from short sequences and maintain high prediction performance when generalizing on long sequences. Furthermore, we design a multi-head aggregation module to capture the complex relationships between questions and the corresponding knowledge components (KCs) by combining dot-product attention and hyperbolic attention. Experimental results on three public educational datasets show that our model exhibits robust capability of length generalization and outperforms all baseline models in terms of AUC. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at https://pykt.org.

Fine-grained urban flow inference (FUFI), which involves inferring fine-grained flow maps from their coarse-grained counterparts, is of tremendous interest in the realm of sustainable urban traffic services. To address the FUFI, existing solutions mainly concentrate on investigating spatial dependencies, introducing external factors, reducing excessive memory costs, etc., -- while rarely considering the catastrophic forgetting (CF) problem. Motivated by recent operator learning, we present an Urban Neural Operator solution with Incremental learning (UNOI), primarily seeking to learn grained-invariant solutions for FUFI in addition to addressing CF. Specifically, we devise an urban neural operator (UNO) in UNOI that learns mappings between approximation spaces by treating the different-grained flows as continuous functions, allowing a more flexible capture of spatial correlations. Furthermore, the phenomenon of CF behind time-related flows could hinder the capture of flow dynamics. Thus, UNOI mitigates CF concerns as well as privacy issues by placing UNO blocks in two incremental settings, i.e., flow-related and task-related. Experimental results on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed solution against the baselines.

Recently, dual-target cross-domain recommendation (DTCDR) has been proposed to alleviate the data sparsity problem by sharing the common knowledge across domains simultaneously. However, existing methods often assume that personal data containing abundant identifiable information can be directly accessed, which results in a controversial privacy leakage problem of DTCDR. To this end, we introduce the P2DTR framework, a novel approach in DTCDR while protecting private user information. Specifically, we first design a novel inter-client knowledge extraction mechanism, which exploits the private set intersection algorithm and prototype-based federated learning to enable collaboratively modeling among multiple users and a server. Furthermore, to improve the recommendation performance based on the extracted common knowledge across domains, we proposed an intra-client enhanced recommendation, consisting of a constrained dominant set (CDS) propagation mechanism and dual-recommendation module. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate that our proposed P2DTR framework achieves superior utility under a privacy-preserving guarantee on both domains.

Traditional text-image person retrieval methods heavily rely on fully matched and identity-annotated multimodal data, representing an ideal yet limited scenario. The issues of handling incomplete multimodal data and the complexities of labeling multimodal data are common challenges encountered in real-world applications. In response to these challenges encountered, we consider a more robust and pragmatic setting termed unsupervised incomplete text-image person retrieval, where person images and text descriptions are not fully matched and lack the supervision of identity labels. To tackle these two problems, we propose the Enhancing Cross-modal Completion and Alignment (ECCA) method. Specifically, we propose a feature-level cross-modal completion strategy for incomplete data. This approach leverages the available cross-modal high semantic similarity features to construct relational graphs for missing modal data, which can generate more reliable completion features. Additionally, to address the cross-modal matching ambiguity, we propose weighted inter-instance granularity alignment as well as enhanced prototype-wise granularity alignment modules that can map semantically similar image-text pairs more compact in the common embedding space. Extensive experiments on public datasets, fully demonstrate the consistent superiority of our method over SOTA text-image person retrieval methods.

Cross-modal hashing has garnered considerable research interest due to its rapid retrieval and low storage costs. However, the majority of existing methods suffer from the limitations of context loss and information redundancy, particularly in simulated textual environments enriched with manually annotated tags or virtual descriptions. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel Visual-Textual Prompt Hashing (VTPH) that aims to bridge the gap between simulated textual and visual modalities within a unified prompt optimization paradigm for cross-modal retrieval. By seamlessly integrating robust reasoning capabilities inherent in large-scale models, we design the visual and textual alignment prompt mechanisms to collaboratively enhance the contextual awareness and semantic capabilities embedded within simulated textual features. Furthermore, an affinity-adaptive contrastive learning strategy is dedicated to dynamically recalibrating the semantic interaction between visual and textual modalities by modeling the nuanced heterogeneity and semantic gaps between simulated and real-world textual environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate both visual and textual prompt learning into cross-modal hashing, facilitating the efficacy of semantic coherence between diverse modalities. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets consistently demonstrate the superiority and robustness of our VTPH method over state-of-the-art competitors.

The significance of network structures in promoting group cooperation within social dilemmas has been widely recognized. Prior studies attribute this facilitation to the assortment of strategies driven by spatial interactions. Although reinforcement learning has been employed to investigate the impact of dynamic interaction on the evolution of cooperation, there remains a lack of understanding about how agents develop neighbour selection behaviours and the formation of strategic assortment within an explicit interaction structure. To address this, our study introduces a computational framework based on multi-agent reinforcement learning in the spatial Prisoner's Dilemma game. This framework allows agents to select dilemma strategies and interacting neighbours based on their long-term experiences, differing from existing research that relies on preset social norms or external incentives. By modelling each agent using two distinct Q-networks, we disentangle the coevolutionary dynamics between cooperation and interaction. The results indicate that long-term experience enables agents to develop the ability to identify non-cooperative neighbours and exhibit a preference for interaction with cooperative ones. This emergent self-organizing behaviour leads to the clustering of agents with similar strategies, thereby increasing network reciprocity and enhancing group cooperation.

In this paper, we propose the use of epistemic dependencies to express data protection policies in Controlled Query Evaluation (CQE), which is a form of confidentiality-preserving query answering over ontologies and databases. The resulting policy language goes significantly beyond those proposed in the literature on CQE so far, allowing for very rich and practically interesting forms of data protection rules. We show the expressive abilities of our framework and study the data complexity of CQE for (unions of) conjunctive queries when ontologies are specified in the Description Logic DL-LiteR. Interestingly, while we show that the problem is in general intractable, we prove tractability for the case of acyclic epistemic dependencies by providing a suitable query rewriting algorithm. The latter result paves the way towards the implementation and practical application of this new approach to CQE.

Topological consistency plays a crucial role in the task of boundary segmentation for reticular images, such as cell membrane segmentation in neuron electron microscopic images, grain boundary segmentation in material microscopic images and road segmentation in aerial images. In these fields, topological changes in segmentation results have a serious impact on the downstream tasks, which can even exceed the misalignment of the boundary itself. To enhance the topology accuracy in segmentation results, we propose the Skea-Topo Aware loss, which is a novel loss function that takes into account the shape of each object and topological significance of the pixels. It consists of two components. First, a skeleton-aware weighted loss improves the segmentation accuracy by better modeling the object geometry with skeletons. Second, a boundary rectified term effectively identifies and emphasizes topological critical pixels in the prediction errors using both foreground and background skeletons in the ground truth and predictions. Experiments prove that our method improves topological consistency by up to 7 points in VI compared to 13 state-of-art methods, based on objective and subjective assessments across three different boundary segmentation datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/clovermini/Skea_topo.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) exhibits significant advancements in games with both perfect and imperfect information, such as Go, Chess, Texas Hold'em, and Dota2. However, DRL encounters considerable challenges when tackling card game DouDiZhu because of the imperfect information, large state-action space, and the sparse reward issue. This paper presents OADMCDou, which combines Oracle Guiding and Adaptive Deep Monte Carlo Method to address the challenges in DouDiZhu. Oracle Guiding trains an Oracle agent with both imperfect and perfect information, gradually reducing reliance on imperfect information to transition to a standard agent. Adaptive Deep Monte Carlo uses gradient weight clipping and constrains the magnitude of updates to prevent extreme policy updates. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, demonstrating OADMCDou's superior performance over the state-of-the-art DouDiZhu AI, DouZero. This superiority over DouZero is reflected in two metrics: a 95% confidence interval of 0.104 ± 0.041 for performance, and a 28.6% reduction in loss.

Wearable devices are being increasingly used in high-impact health applications including vital sign monitoring, rehabilitation, and movement disorders. Wearable health monitoring can aid in the United Nations social development goal of healthy lives by enabling early warning, risk reduction, and management of health risks. Health tasks on wearable devices employ multiple sensors to collect relevant parameters of user’s health and make decisions using machine learning (ML) algorithms. The ML algorithms assume that data from all sensors are available for the health monitoring tasks. However, the applications may encounter missing or incomplete data due to user error, energy limitations, or sensor malfunction. Missing data results in significant loss of accuracy and quality of service. This paper presents a novel Classifier-Aware iMputation (CAM) approach to impute missing data such that classifier accuracy for health tasks is not affected. Specifically, CAM employs unsupervised clustering followed by a principled search algorithm to uncover imputation patterns that maintain high accuracy. Evaluations on seven diverse health tasks show that CAM achieves accuracy within 5% of the baseline with no missing data when one sensor is missing. CAM also achieves significantly higher accuracy compared to generative approaches with negligible energy overhead, making it suitable for wide range of wearable applications.

We introduce Energy Reactive Modules Games (ERMGs), an extension of Reactive Modules Games (RMGs) in which actions incur an energy cost (which may be positive or negative), and the choices that players make are restricted by the energy available to them. In ERMGs, each action is associated with an energy level update, which determines how their energy level is affected by the performance of the action. In addition, agents are provided with an initial energy allowance. This allowance plays a crucial role in shaping an agent’s behaviour, as it must be taken into consideration when one is determining their strategy: agents may only perform actions if they have the requisite energy. We begin by studying rational verification for ERMGs and then introduce Endogenous ERMGs, where agents can choose to transfer their energy to other agents. This exchange may enable equilibria that are impossible to achieve without such transfers. We study the decision problem of whether a stable outcome exists under both the Nash equilibrium and Core solution concepts.

Piano audio-to-score transcription (A2S) is an important yet underexplored task with extensive applications for music composition, practice, and analysis. However, existing end-to-end piano A2S systems faced difficulties in retrieving bar-level information such as key and time signatures, and have been trained and evaluated with only synthetic data. To address these limitations, we propose a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model with a hierarchical decoder that aligns with the hierarchical structure of musical scores, enabling the transcription of score information at both the bar and note levels by multi-task learning. To bridge the gap between synthetic data and recordings of human performance, we propose a two-stage training scheme, which involves pre-training the model using an expressive performance rendering (EPR) system on synthetic audio, followed by fine-tuning the model using recordings of human performance. To preserve the voicing structure for score reconstruction, we propose a pre-processing method for **Kern scores in scenarios with an unconstrained number of voices. Experimental results support the effectiveness of our proposed approaches, in terms of both transcription performance on synthetic audio data in comparison to the current state-of-the-art, and the first experiment on human recordings.

The standardized Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) suffers from limited coding performance and low-quality reconstruction. To address this, we propose AuxGR, a performance-complexity tradeoff solution for point cloud geometry restoration: leveraging auxiliary bitstream to enhance the quality of G-PCC compressed point cloud geometry. This auxiliary bitstream efficiently encapsulates spatio-temporal information. For static coding, we perform paired information embedding (PIE) on the G-PCC decoded frame by employing target convolutions from its original counterpart, producing an auxiliary bitstream containing abundant original information. For dynamic coding, in addition to PIE, we propose temporal information embedding (TIE) to capture motion information between the previously restored and the current G-PCC decoded frames. TIE applies target kNN attention between them, which ensures the temporal neighborhood construction for each point and implicitly represents motions. Due to the similarity across temporal frames, only the residuals between TIE and PIE outputs are compressed as auxiliary bitstream. Experimental results demonstrate that AuxGR notably outperforms existing methods in both static and dynamic coding scenarios. Moreover, our framework enables the flexible incorporation of auxiliary information under computation constraints, which is attractive to real applications.

Freight forwarding plays a crucial role in facilitating global trade and logistics. However, as the freight forwarding market is extremely fragmented, freight forwarders often face the issue of not being able to fill the available shipping capacity. This recurrent issue motivates the creation of various freight forwarding networks that aim at exchanging capacities and demands so that the resource utilization of individual freight forwarders can be maximized. In this paper, we focus on how to design such a collaborative network based on collaborative game theory, with the Shapley value representing a fair scheme for profit sharing. Noting that the exact computation of Shapley values is intractable for large-scale real-world scenarios, we incorporate the observation that collaboration among two forwarders is only possible if their service routes and demands overlap. This leads to a new class of collaborative games called the Locally Collaborative Games (LCGs), where agents can only collaborate with their neighbors. We propose an efficient approach to compute Shapley values for LCGs, and numerically demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approach for a wide variety of network structures.

Neural networks often assume independence among input data samples, disregarding correlations arising from inherent clustering patterns in real-world datasets (e.g., due to different sites or repeated measurements). Recently, mixed effects neural networks (MENNs) which separate cluster-specific 'random effects' from cluster-invariant 'fixed effects' have been proposed to improve generalization and interpretability for clustered data. However, existing methods only allow for approximate quantification of cluster effects and are limited to regression and binary targets with only one clustering feature. We present MC-GMENN, a novel approach employing Monte Carlo techniques to train Generalized Mixed Effects Neural Networks. We empirically demonstrate that MC-GMENN outperforms existing mixed effects deep learning models in terms of generalization performance, time complexity, and quantification of inter-cluster variance. Additionally, MC-GMENN is applicable to a wide range of datasets, including multi-class classification tasks with multiple high-cardinality categorical features. For these datasets, we show that MC-GMENN outperforms conventional encoding and embedding methods, simultaneously offering a principled methodology for interpreting the effects of clustering patterns.

Recently, remarkable progress has been made over large language models (LLMs), demonstrating their unprecedented capability in varieties of natural language tasks. However, completely training a large general-purpose model from the scratch is challenging for time series analysis, due to the large volumes and varieties of time series data, as well as the non-stationarity that leads to concept drift impeding continuous model adaptation and re-training. Recent advances have shown that pre-trained LLMs can be exploited to capture complex dependencies in time series data and facilitate various applications. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of existing methods that leverage LLMs for time series analysis. Specifically, we first state the challenges and motivations of applying language models in the context of time series as well as brief preliminaries of LLMs. Next, we summarize the general pipeline for LLM-based time series analysis, categorize existing methods into different groups (\textit{i.e.}, direct query, tokenization, prompt design, fine-tune, and model integration), and highlight the key ideas within each group. We also discuss the applications of LLMs for both general and spatial-temporal time series data, tailored to specific domains. Finally, we thoroughly discuss future research opportunities to empower time series analysis with LLMs.

Dialogue relation extraction (DRE) aims to extract relations between two arguments within a dialogue, which is more challenging than standard RE due to the higher person pronoun frequency and lower information density in dialogues. However, existing DRE methods still suffer from two serious issues: (1) hard to capture long and sparse multi-turn information, and (2) struggle to extract golden relations based on partial dialogues, which motivates us to discover more effective methods that can alleviate the above issues. We notice that the rise of large language models (LLMs) has sparked considerable interest in evaluating their performance across diverse tasks. To this end, we initially investigate the capabilities of different LLMs in DRE, considering both proprietary models and open-source models. Interestingly, we discover that LLMs significantly alleviate two issues in existing DRE methods. Generally, we have following findings: (1) scaling up model size substantially boosts the overall DRE performance and achieves exceptional results, tackling the difficulty of capturing long and sparse multi-turn information; (2) LLMs encounter with much smaller performance drop from entire dialogue setting to partial dialogue setting compared to existing methods; (3) LLMs deliver competitive or superior performances under both full-shot and few-shot settings compared to current state-of-the-art; (4) LLMs show modest performances on inverse relations but much stronger improvements on general relations, and they can handle dialogues of various lengths especially for longer sequences.

This paper describes a newly launched project that will produce a new approach to public microtransit for underserved communities. Public microtransit cannot rely on pricing signals to manage demand, and current approaches face the challenges of simultaneously being underutilized and overextended. This project conceives of the setting as a sociotechnical system. Its main idea is to engage users through AI agents in conjunction with platform constraints to find solutions that purely technical conceptions cannot find. The project was specified over an intense series of discussions with key stakeholders (riders, city government, and nongovernmental agencies) and brings together expertise in the disciplines of AI, Operations Research, Urban Planning, Psychology, and Community Development. The project will culminate in a pilot study, results from which will facilitate the transfer of its technology to additional communities.

Social norms play a crucial role in guiding agents towards understanding and adhering to standards of behavior, thus reducing social conflicts within multi-agent systems (MASs). However, current LLM-based (or generative) MASs lack the capability to be normative. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, named CRSEC, to empower the emergence of social norms within generative MASs. Our architecture consists of four modules: Creation & Representation, Spreading, Evaluation, and Compliance. This addresses several important aspects of the emergent processes all in one: (i) where social norms come from, (ii) how they are formally represented, (iii) how they spread through agents' communications and observations, (iv) how they are examined with a sanity check and synthesized in the long term, and (v) how they are incorporated into agents' planning and actions. Our experiments deployed in the Smallville sandbox game environment demonstrate the capability of our architecture to establish social norms and reduce social conflicts within generative MASs. The positive outcomes of our human evaluation, conducted with 30 evaluators, further affirm the effectiveness of our approach. Our project can be accessed via the following link: https://github.com/sxswz213/CRSEC.