AAAI 2021 论文列表

This paper explores a new online learning problem where the input sequence lives in an over-time varying feature space and the ground-truth label of any input point is given only occasionally, making online learners less restrictive and more applicable. The crux in this setting lies in how to exploit the very limited labels to efficiently update the online learners. Plausible ideas such as propagating labels from labeled points to their neighbors through uncovering the point-wise geometric relations face two challenges: (1) distance measurement fails to work as different points may be described by disparate sets of features and (2) storing the geometric shape, which is formed by all arrived points, is unrealistic in an online setting. To address these challenges, we first construct a universal feature space that accumulates all observed features, making distance measurement feasible. Then, we use manifolds to represent the geometric shapes and approximate them in a sparse means, making manifolds computational and memory tractable in online learning. We frame these two building blocks into a regularized risk minimization algorithm. Theoretical analysis and empirical evidence substantiate the viability and effectiveness of our proposal.

In this paper, we consider online continuous DR-submodular maximization with linear stochastic long-term constraints. Compared to the prior work on online submodular maximization, our setting introduces the extra complication of stochastic linear constraint functions that are i.i.d. generated at each round. In particular, at each time step a DR-submodular utility function and a constraint vector, i.i.d. generated from an unknown distribution, are revealed after committing to an action and we aim to maximize the overall utility while the expected cumulative resource consumption is below a fixed budget. Stochastic long-term constraints arise naturally in applications where there is a limited budget or resource available and resource consumption at each step is governed by stochastically time-varying environments. We propose the Online Lagrangian Frank-Wolfe (OLFW) algorithm to solve this class of online problems. We analyze the performance of the OLFW algorithm and we obtain sub-linear regret bounds as well as sub-linear cumulative constraint violation bounds, both in expectation and with high probability.

As image-based deep learning becomes pervasive on every device, from cell phones to smart watches, there is a growing need to develop methods that continually learn from data while minimizing memory footprint and power consumption. While memory replay techniques have shown exceptional promise for this task of continual learning, the best method for selecting which buffered images to replay is still an open question. In this paper, we specifically focus on the online class-incremental setting where a model needs to learn new classes continually from an online data stream. To this end, we contribute a novel Adversarial Shapley value scoring method that scores memory data samples according to their ability to preserve latent decision boundaries for previously observed classes (to maintain learning stability and avoid forgetting) while interfering with latent decision boundaries of current classes being learned (to encourage plasticity and optimal learning of new class boundaries). Overall, we observe that our proposed ASER method provides competitive or improved performance compared to state-of-the-art replay-based continual learning methods on a variety of datasets.

Recognition in planning seeks to find agent intentions, goals or activities given a set of observations and a knowledge library (e.g. goal states, plans or domain theories). In this work we introduce the problem of Online Action Recognition. It consists in recognizing, in an open world, the planning action that best explains a partially observable state transition from a knowledge library of first-order STRIPS actions, which is initially empty. We frame this as an optimization problem, and propose two algorithms to address it: Action Unification (AU) and Online Action Recognition through Unification (OARU). The former builds on logic unification and generalizes two input actions using weighted partial MaxSAT. The latter looks for an action within the library that explains an observed transition. If there is such action, it generalizes it making use of AU, building in this way an AU hierarchy. Otherwise, OARU inserts a Trivial Grounded Action (TGA) in the library that explains just that transition. We report results on benchmarks from the International Planning Competition and PDDLGym, where OARU recognizes actions accurately with respect to expert knowledge, and shows real-time performance.

We solve a challenging yet practically useful variant of 3D Bin Packing Problem (3D-BPP). In our problem, the agent has limited information about the items to be packed into a single bin, and an item must be packed immediately after its arrival without buffering or readjusting. The item's placement also subjects to the constraints of order dependence and physical stability. We formulate this online 3D-BPP as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). To solve the problem, we propose an effective and easy-to-implement constrained deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method under the actor-critic framework. In particular, we introduce a prediction-and-projection scheme: The agent first predicts a feasibility mask for the placement actions as an auxiliary task and then uses the mask to modulate the action probabilities output by the actor during training. Such supervision and projection facilitate the agent to learn feasible policies very efficiently. Our method can be easily extended to handle lookahead items, multi-bin packing, and item re-orienting. We have conducted extensive evaluation showing that the learned policy significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. A preliminary user study even suggests that our method might attain a human-level performance.

Relying on the diverse graph convolution operations that have emerged in recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) are shown to be powerful to deal with high-dimensional non-Euclidean domains, such as social networks or citation networks. Despite the tremendous human efforts been taken to explore new graph convolution operations, there are a few attempts to automatically search operations in GNNs. The search space of GNNs is significantly larger than that of CNNs, because of diverse components in the message-passing of GNNs. This, therefore, prevents the straightforward application of classical NAS methods for GNNs. In this work, we propose a novel dynamic one-shot search space for multi-branch neural architectures of GNNs. The dynamic search space maintains a subset of the large search space along with a set of importance weights for operation candidates in the subset as the architecture parameters. After each iteration, the subset is pruned by removing candidates with low importance weights and is expanded with new operations. The dynamic subsets of operation candidates are not uniform but is individual for each edge in the computation graph of the neural architecture, which can ensure the diversity of operations in the final architecture is as competitive as direct search in the large search space. Our experiments of semi-supervised and supervised node classification on citation networks, including Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed, demonstrate that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art manually designed architectures and reaches competitive performance to existing GNN NAS approaches with up to 10 times of speedup.

The paper proposes a novel generative adversarial network for one-shot face reenactment, which can animate a single face image to a different pose-and-expression (provided by a driving image) while keeping its original appearance. The core of our network is a novel mechanism called appearance adaptive normalization, which can effectively integrate the appearance information from the input image into our face generator by modulating the feature maps of the generator using the learned adaptive parameters. Furthermore, we specially design a local net to reenact the local facial components (i.e., eyes, nose and mouth) first, which is a much easier task for the network to learn and can in turn provide explicit anchors to guide our face generator to learn the global appearance and pose-and-expression. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the significant efficacy of our model compared with prior one-shot methods.

Current training objectives of existing person Re-IDentification (ReID) models only ensure that the loss of the model decreases on selected training batch, with no regards to the performance on samples outside the batch. It will inevitably cause the model to over-fit the data in the dominant position (e.g., head data in imbalanced class, easy samples or noisy samples). The latest resampling methods address the issue by designing specific criterion to select specific samples that trains the model generalize more on certain type of data (e.g., hard samples, tail data), which is not adaptive to the inconsistent real world ReID data distributions. Therefore, instead of simply presuming on what samples are generalizable, this paper proposes a one-for-more training objective that directly takes the generalization ability of selected samples as a loss function and learn a sampler to automatically select generalizable samples. More importantly, our proposed one-for-more based sampler can be seamlessly integrated into the ReID training framework which is able to simultaneously train ReID models and the sampler in an end-to-end fashion. The experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the ReID model training and boost the performance of ReID models.

In Text-to-AMR parsing, current state-of-the-art semantic parsers use cumbersome pipelines integrating several different modules or components, and exploit graph recategorization, i.e., a set of content-specific heuristics that are developed on the basis of the training set. However, the generalizability of graph recategorization in an out-of-distribution setting is unclear. In contrast, state-of-the-art AMR-to-Text generation, which can be seen as the inverse to parsing, is based on simpler seq2seq. In this paper, we cast Text-to-AMR and AMR-to-Text as a symmetric transduction task and show that by devising a careful graph linearization and extending a pretrained encoder-decoder model, it is possible to obtain state-of-the-art performances in both tasks using the very same seq2seq approach, i.e., SPRING (Symmetric PaRsIng aNd Generation). Our model does not require complex pipelines, nor heuristics built on heavy assumptions. In fact, we drop the need for graph recategorization, showing that this technique is actually harmful outside of the standard benchmark. Finally, we outperform the previous state of the art on the English AMR 2.0 dataset by a large margin: on Text-to-AMR we obtain an improvement of 3.6 Smatch points, while on AMR-to-Text we outperform the state of the art by 11.2 BLEU points. We release the software at github.com/SapienzaNLP/spring.

We present a new synthesis framework based on the on-the-fly DFA construction for LTL over finite traces (LTLf ). Extant approaches rely heavily on the construction of the complete DFA w.r.t. the input LTLf formula, whose size can be doubly exponential to the size of the formula in the worst case. Under those approaches, the synthesis cannot be conducted unless the whole DFA is completely constructed, which is not only inefficient but also not scalable in practice. Indeed, the DFA construction is the main bottleneck of LTLf synthesis in prior work. To mitigate this challenge, we follow two steps in this paper: Firstly, we present several light-weight pre-processing techniques such that the synthesis result can be obtained even without DFA construction; Secondly, we propose to achieve the synthesis together with the on-the-fly DFA construction such that the synthesis result can be obtained before constructing the whole DFA. The on-the-fly DFA construction is implemented using the SAT-based techniques for automata generation. We compared our new approach with the traditional ones on extensive LTLf synthesis benchmarks. Experimental results showed that the pre-processing techniques have a significant advantage on the synthesis performance in terms of scalability, and the on-the-fly synthesis is able to complement extant approaches on both realizable and unrealizable cases.

We propose an approach to learn an extensional representation of a discrete deterministic planning domain from observations in a continuous space navigated by the agent actions. This is achieved through the use of a perception function providing the likelihood of a real-value observation being in a given state of the planning domain after executing an action. The agent learns an extensional representation of the domain (the set of states, the transitions from states to states caused by actions) and the perception function on-line, while it acts for accomplishing its task. In order to provide a practical approach that can scale up to large state spaces, a “draft” intensional (PDDL-based) model of the planning domain is used to guide the exploration of the environment and learn the states and state transitions. The proposed approach uses a novel algorithm to (i) construct the extensional representation of the domain by interleaving symbolic planning in the PDDL intensional representation and search in the state transition graph of the extensional representation; (ii) incrementally refine the intensional representation taking into account information about the actions that the agent cannot execute. An experimental analysis shows that the novel approach can scale up to large state spaces, thus overcoming the limits in scalability of the previous work.

We show that Neural ODEs, an emerging class of time-continuous neural networks, can be verified by solving a set of global-optimization problems. For this purpose, we introduce Stochastic Lagrangian Reachability (SLR), an abstraction-based technique for constructing a tight Reachtube (an over-approximation of the set of reachable states over a given time-horizon), and provide stochastic guarantees in the form of confidence intervals for the Reachtube bounds. SLR inherently avoids the infamous wrapping effect (accumulation of over-approximation errors) by performing local optimization steps to expand safe regions instead of repeatedly forward-propagating them as is done by deterministic reachability methods. To enable fast local optimizations, we introduce a novel forward-mode adjoint sensitivity method to compute gradients without the need for backpropagation. Finally, we establish asymptotic and non-asymptotic convergence rates for SLR.

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.

Recent research has pointed to a limitation of word-level neural language models with softmax outputs. This limitation, known as the softmax bottleneck refers to the inability of these models to produce high-rank log probability (log P) matrices. Various solutions have been proposed to break this bottleneck, including Mixture of Softmaxes, SigSoftmax, and Linear Monotonic Softmax with Piecewise Linear Increasing Functions. They were reported to offer better performance in terms of perplexity on test data. A natural perception from these results is a strong positive correlation between the rank of the log P matrix and the model's performance. In this work, we show via an extensive empirical study that such a correlation is fairly weak and that the high-rank of the log P matrix is neither necessary nor sufficient for better test perplexity. Although our results are empirical, they are established in part via the construction of a rich family of models, which we call Generalized SigSoftmax. They are able to create diverse ranks for the log P matrices. We also present an investigation as to why the proposed solutions achieve better performance.

We study fair allocation of indivisible items, both goods and chores, under the popular fairness notion of maximin share (MMS). The problem is well-studied when there are only goods (or chores), where a PTAS to compute the MMS values of agents is well-known. In contrast, for the mixed manna, a recent result showed that finding even an approximate MMS value of an agent up to any approximation factor in (0,1] is NP-hard for general instances. In this paper, we complement the hardness result by obtaining a PTAS to compute the MMS value when its absolute value is at least 1/p times either the total value of all the goods or total cost of all the chores, for some constant p valued at least 1.

A well known result is that, given a consistent heuristic and no other source of information, A* does expand a minimal number of nodes up to tie-breaking. We extend this analysis for A* with dominance pruning, which exploits a dominance relation to eliminate some nodes during the search. We show that the expansion order of A* is not necessarily optimally efficient when considering dominance pruning with arbitrary dominance relations, but it remains optimally efficient under certain restrictions for the heuristic and dominance relation.

Cross-lingual models trained on source language tasks possess the capability to directly transfer to target languages. However, since word order variances generally exist in different languages, cross-lingual models that overfit into the word order of the source language could have sub-optimal performance in target languages. In this paper, we hypothesize that reducing the word order information fitted into the models can improve the adaptation performance in target languages. To verify this hypothesis, we introduce several methods to make models encode less word order information of the source language and test them based on cross-lingual word embeddings and the pre-trained multilingual model. Experimental results on three sequence labeling tasks (i.e., part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and slot filling tasks) show that reducing word order information injected into the model can achieve better zero-shot cross-lingual performance. Further analysis illustrates that fitting excessive or insufficient word order information into the model results in inferior cross-lingual performance. Moreover, our proposed methods can also be applied to strong cross-lingual models and further improve their performance.

Federated Learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. A leading training algorithm in FL is local SGD, which updates the model parameter on each worker and averages model parameters across different workers only once in a while. Although it has fewer communication rounds than the classical parallel SGD, local SGD still has large communication overhead in each communication round for large machine learning models, such as deep neural networks. To address this issue, we propose a new communication-efficient distributed SGD method, which can significantly reduce the communication cost by the error-compensated double compression mechanism. Under the non-convex setting, our theoretical results show that our approach has better communication complexity than existing methods and enjoys the same linear speedup regarding the number of workers as the full-precision local SGD. Moreover, we propose a communication-efficient distributed SGD with momentum, which also has better communication complexity than existing methods and enjoys a linear speedup with respect to the number of workers. At last, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the performance of our proposed two methods. Moreover, we propose a communication-efficient distributed SGD with momentum to accelerate the convergence, which also has better communication complexity than existing methods and enjoys a linear speedup with respect to the number of workers. At last, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the performance of our proposed methods.

Many important problems in AI, among them SAT, #SAT, and probabilistic inference, amount to Sum-of-Products Problems, i.e. evaluating a sum of products of values from some semiring R. While efficiently solvable cases are known, a systematic study of the complexity of this problem is missing. We characterize the latter by NP(R), a novel generalization of NP over semiring R, and link it to well-known complexity classes. While NP(R) is unlikely to be contained in FPSPACE(poly) in general, for a wide range of commutative (resp. in addition idempotent) semirings, there are reductions to #P (resp. NP) and solutions are thus only mildly harder to compute. We finally discuss NP(R)-complete reasoning problems in well-known semiring formalisms, among them Semiring-based Constraint Satisfaction Problems, obtaining new insights into their computational properties.