IJCAI 2021 论文列表

Rideshare and ride-pooling platforms use artificial intelligence-based matching algorithms to pair riders and drivers. However, these platforms can induce unfairness either through an unequal income distribution or disparate treatment of riders. We investigate two methods to reduce forms of inequality in ride-pooling platforms: by incorporating fairness constraints into the objective function and redistributing income to drivers who deserve more. To test these out, we use New York City taxi data to evaluate their performance on both the rider and driver side. For the first method, we find that optimizing for driver fairness out-performs state-of-the-art models in terms of the number of riders serviced, showing that optimizing for fairness can assist profitability in certain circumstances. For the second method, we explore income redistribution as a method to combat income inequality by having drivers keep an $r$ fraction of their income, and contribute the rest to a redistribution pool. For certain values of $r$, most drivers earn near their Shapley value, while still incentivizing drivers to maximize income, thereby avoiding the free-rider problem and reducing income variability. While the first method is useful because it improves both rider and driver-side fairness, the second method is useful because it improves fairness without affecting profitability, and both methods can be combined to improve rider and driver-side fairness.

The vast diversity of internal designs of black-box AI systems and their nuanced zones of safe functionality make it difficult for a layperson to use them without unintended side effects. The focus of my dissertation is to develop algorithms and requirements of interpretability that would enable a user to assess and understand the limits of an AI system's safe operability. We develop an assessment module that lets an AI system execute high-level instruction sequences in simulators and answer the user queries about its execution of sequences of actions. Our results show that such a primitive query-response capability is sufficient to efficiently derive a user-interpretable model of the system in stationary, fully observable, and deterministic settings.

Modern machine learning algorithms crucially rely on several design decisions to achieve strong performance, making the problem of Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) more important than ever. Here, we combine the advantages of the popular bandit-based HPO method Hyperband (HB) and the evolutionary search approach of Differential Evolution (DE) to yield a new HPO method which we call DEHB. Comprehensive results on a very broad range of HPO problems, as well as a wide range of tabular benchmarks from neural architecture search, demonstrate that DEHB achieves strong performance far more robustly than all previous HPO methods we are aware of, especially for high-dimensional problems with discrete input dimensions. For example, DEHB is up to 1000x faster than random search. It is also efficient in computational time, conceptually simple and easy to implement, positioning it well to become a new default HPO method.

We propose a novel, complete algorithm for the verification and analysis of feed-forward, ReLU-based neural networks. The algorithm, based on symbolic interval propagation, introduces a new method for determining split-nodes which evaluates the indirect effect that splitting has on the relaxations of successor nodes. We combine this with a new efficient linear-programming encoding of the splitting constraints to further improve the algorithm’s performance. The resulting implementation, DeepSplit, achieved speedups of 1–2 orders of magnitude and 21-34% fewer timeouts when compared to the current SoA toolkits.

Dynamic Algorithm Configuration (DAC) aims to dynamically control a target algorithm's hyperparameters in order to improve its performance. Several theoretical and empirical results have demonstrated the benefits of dynamically controlling hyperparameters in domains like evolutionary computation, AI Planning or deep learning. Replicating these results, as well as studying new methods for DAC, however, is difficult since existing benchmarks are often specialized and incompatible with the same interfaces. To facilitate benchmarking and thus research on DAC, we propose DACBench, a benchmark library that seeks to collect and standardize existing DAC benchmarks from different AI domains, as well as provide a template for new ones. For the design of DACBench, we focused on important desiderata, such as (i) flexibility, (ii) reproducibility, (iii) extensibility and (iv) automatic documentation and visualization. To show the potential, broad applicability and challenges of DAC, we explore how a set of six initial benchmarks compare in several dimensions of difficulty.

Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (SCSR) is the task of recommending the next item based on a sequence of recorded user behaviors, where multiple users share a single account, and their behaviours are available in multiple domains. Existing work on solving SCSR mainly relies on mining sequential patterns via RNN-based models, which are not expressive enough to capture the relationships among multiple entities. Moreover, all existing algorithms try to bridge two domains via knowledge transfer in the latent space, and the explicit cross-domain graph structure is unexploited. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based solution, namely DA-GCN, to address the above challenges. Specifically, we first link users and items in each domain as a graph. Then, we devise a domain-aware graph convolution network to learn user-specific node representations. To fully account for users' domain-specific preferences on items, two novel attention mechanisms are further developed to selectively guide the message passing process. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our DA-GCN method.

Classical planning tasks are commonly described in PDDL, while most planning systems operate on a grounded finite-domain representation (FDR). The translation of PDDL into FDR is complex and has a lot of choice points---it involves identifying so called mutex groups---but most systems rely on the translator that comes with Fast Downward. Yet the translation choice points can strongly impact performance. Prior work has considered optimizing FDR encodings in terms of the number of variables produced. Here we go one step further by proposing to custom-design FDR encodings, optimizing the encoding to suit particular planning techniques. We develop such a custom design here for red-black planning, a partial delete relaxation technique. The FDR encoding affects the causal graph and the domain transition graph structures, which govern the tractable fragment of red-black planning and hence affects the respective heuristic function. We develop integer linear programming techniques optimizing the scope of that fragment in the resulting FDR encoding. We empirically show that the performance of red-black planning can be improved through such FDR custom design.

Graph-level representation learning is to learn low-dimensional representation for the entire graph, which has shown a large impact on real-world applications. Recently, limited by expensive labeled data, contrastive learning based graph-level representation learning attracts considerable attention. However, these methods mainly focus on graph augmentation for positive samples, while the effect of negative samples is less explored. In this paper, we study the impact of negative samples on learning graph-level representations, and a novel curriculum contrastive learning framework for self-supervised graph-level representation, called CuCo, is proposed. Specifically, we introduce four graph augmentation techniques to obtain the positive and negative samples, and utilize graph neural networks to learn their representations. Then a scoring function is proposed to sort negative samples from easy to hard and a pacing function is to automatically select the negative samples in each training procedure. Extensive experiments on fifteen graph classification real-world datasets, as well as the parameter analysis, well demonstrate that our proposed CuCo yields truly encouraging results in terms of performance on classification and convergence.

With task-oriented dialogue systems being widely applied in everyday life, slot filling, the essential component of task-oriented dialogue systems, is required to be quickly adapted to new domains that contain domain-specific slots with few or no training data. Previous methods for slot filling usually adopt sequence labeling framework, which, however, often has limited ability when dealing with the domain-specific slots. In this paper, we take a new perspective on cross-domain slot filling by framing it as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) problem. Our approach firstly transforms slot names into well-designed queries, which contain rich informative prior knowledge and are very helpful for the detection of domain-specific slots. In addition, we utilize the large-scale MRC dataset for pre-training, which further alleviates the data scarcity problem. Experimental results on SNIPS and ATIS datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

To address the long-standing data sparsity problem in recommender systems (RSs), cross-domain recommendation (CDR) has been proposed to leverage the relatively richer information from a richer domain to improve the recommendation performance in a sparser domain. Although CDR has been extensively studied in recent years, there is a lack of a systematic review of the existing CDR approaches. To fill this gap, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of existing CDR approaches, including challenges, research progress, and prospects. Specifically, we first summarize existing CDR approaches into four types, including single-target CDR, single-target multi-domain recommendation (MDR), dual-target CDR, and multi-target CDR. We then present the definitions and challenges of these CDR approaches. Next, we propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these approaches and report their research progress in detail. In the end, we share several promising prospects in CDR.

Few-shot classification aims to recognize unseen classes with few labeled samples from each class. Many meta-learning models for few-shot classification elaborately design various task-shared inductive bias (meta-knowledge) to solve such tasks, and achieve impressive performance. However, when there exists the domain shift between the training tasks and the test tasks, the obtained inductive bias fails to generalize across domains, which degrades the performance of the meta-learning models. In this work, we aim to improve the robustness of the inductive bias through task augmentation. Concretely, we consider the worst-case problem around the source task distribution, and propose the adversarial task augmentation method which can generate the inductive bias-adaptive 'challenging' tasks. Our method can be used as a simple plug-and-play module for various meta-learning models, and improve their cross-domain generalization capability. We conduct extensive experiments under the cross-domain setting, using nine few-shot classification datasets: mini-ImageNet, CUB, Cars, Places, Plantae, CropDiseases, EuroSAT, ISIC and ChestX. Experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the few-shot classification performance of the meta-learning models under domain shift, and outperforms the existing works. Our code is available at https://github.com/Haoqing-Wang/CDFSL-ATA.

Accurate prediction of pedestrian crossing behaviors by autonomous vehicles can significantly improve traffic safety. Existing approaches often model pedestrian behaviors using trajectories or poses but do not offer a deeper semantic interpretation of a person's actions or how actions influence a pedestrian's intention to cross in the future. In this work, we follow the neuroscience and psychological literature to define pedestrian crossing behavior as a combination of an unobserved inner will (a probabilistic representation of binary intent of crossing vs. not crossing) and a set of multi-class actions (e.g., walking, standing, etc.). Intent generates actions, and the future actions in turn reflect the intent. We present a novel multi-task network that predicts future pedestrian actions and uses predicted future action as a prior to detect the present intent and action of the pedestrian. We also designed an attention relation network to incorporate external environmental contexts thus further improve intent and action detection performance. We evaluated our approach on two naturalistic driving datasets, PIE and JAAD, and extensive experiments show significantly improved and more explainable results for both intent detection and action prediction over state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at: https://github.com/umautobots/pedestrian_intent_action_detection

The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) entitle individuals to explanations for automated decisions. The form, comprehensibility, and even existence of such explanations remain open problems, investigated as part of explainable AI. We adopt the approach of counterfactual explanations and apply it to decisions made by declarative optimization models. We argue that inverse combinatorial optimization is particularly suited for counterfactual explanations but that the computational difficulties and relatively nascent literature make its application a challenge. To make progress, we address the case of counterfactual explanations that isolate the minimal differences for an individual. We show that under two common optimization functions, full inverse optimization is unnecessary. In particular, we show that for functions of the form of the sum of weighted binary variables, which includes frameworks such as weighted MaxSAT, a solution can be found by solving a slightly modified version of the original optimization model. In contrast, the sum of weighted integer variables can be solved with a binary search over a series of modifications to the original model.

Multi-label text classification is an essential task in natural language processing. Existing multi-label classification models generally consider labels as categorical variables and ignore the exploitation of label semantics. In this paper, we view the task as a correlation-guided text representation problem: an attention-based two-step framework is proposed to integrate text information and label semantics by jointly learning words and labels in the same space. In this way, we aim to capture high-order label-label correlations as well as context-label correlations. Specifically, the proposed approach works by learning token-level representations of words and labels globally through a multi-layer Transformer and constructing an attention vector through word-label correlation matrix to generate the text representation. It ensures that relevant words receive higher weights than irrelevant words and thus directly optimizes the classification performance. Extensive experiments over benchmark multi-label datasets clearly validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and further analysis demonstrates that it is competitive in both predicting low-frequency labels and convergence speed.

Due to the dynamic health status of patients and discrepant stability of physiological variables, health data often presents as irregular multi-rate multivariate time series (IMR-MTS) with significantly varying sampling rates. Existing methods mainly study changes of IMR-MTS values in the time domain, without considering their different dominant frequencies and varying data quality. Hence, we propose a novel Cooperative Joint Attentive Network (CJANet) to analyze IMR-MTS in frequency domain, which adaptively handling discrepant dominant frequencies while tackling diverse data qualities caused by irregular sampling. In particular, novel dual-channel joint attention is designed to jointly identify important magnitude and phase signals while detecting their dominant frequencies, automatically enlarging the positive influence of key variables and frequencies. Furthermore, a new cooperative learning module is introduced to enhance information exchange between magnitude and phase channels, effectively integrating global signals to optimize the network. A frequency-aware fusion strategy is finally designed to aggregate the learned features. Extensive experimental results on real-world medical datasets indicate that CJANet significantly outperforms existing methods and provides highly interpretable results.

When can cooperation arise from self-interested decisions in public goods games? And how can we help agents to act cooperatively? We examine these classical questions in a pivotal participation game, a variant of public good games, where heterogeneous agents make binary participation decisions on contributing their endowments, and the public project succeeds when it has enough contributions. We prove it is NP-complete to decide the existence of a cooperative Nash equilibrium such that the project succeeds. We demonstrate that the decision problem becomes easy if agents are homogeneous enough. We then propose two algorithms to help cooperation in the game. Our first algorithm adds an external investment to the public project, and our second algorithm uses matching funds. We show the cost to induce a cooperative Nash equilibrium is near-optimal for both algorithms. Finally, the cost of matching funds can always be smaller than the cost of adding an external investment. Intuitively, matching funds provide a greater incentive for cooperation than adding an external investment does.

A network of robots can be viewed as a signal graph, describing the underlying network topology with naturally distributed architectures, whose nodes are assigned to data values associated with each robot. Graph neural networks (GNNs) learn representations from signal graphs, thus making them well-suited candidates for learning distributed controllers. Oftentimes, existing GNN architectures assume ideal scenarios, while ignoring the possibility that this distributed graph may change along time due to link failures or topology variations, which can be found in dynamic settings. A mismatch between the graphs on which GNNs were trained and the ones on which they are tested is thus formed. Utilizing online learning, GNNs can be retrained at testing time, overcoming this issue. However, most online algorithms are centralized and work on convex problems (which GNNs scarcely lead to). This paper introduces novel architectures which solve the convexity restriction and can be easily updated in a distributed, online manner. Finally, we provide experiments, showing how these models can be applied to optimizing formation control in a swarm of flocking robots.

This paper presents a conversational lifelog mining system, ConvLogMiner, which detects personal life events from the human online conversation in real-time. Given a daily conversation of two speakers, ConvLogMiner identifies the new life events specific to each speaker that occur in the latest utterances. The lifelogs mined by our system are useful to provide complementary information to support lifestyle analysis and memory assistance service.

Rankings are the primary interface through which many online platforms match users to items (e.g. news, products, music, video). In these two-sided markets, not only do the users draw utility from the rankings, but the rankings also determine the utility (e.g. exposure, revenue) for the item providers (e.g. publishers, sellers, artists, studios). It has already been noted that myopically optimizing utility to the users -- as done by virtually all learning-to-rank algorithms -- can be unfair to the item providers. We, therefore, present a learning-to-rank approach for explicitly enforcing merit-based fairness guarantees to groups of items (e.g. articles by the same publisher, tracks by the same artist). In particular, we propose a learning algorithm that ensures notions of amortized group fairness, while simultaneously learning the ranking function from implicit feedback data. The algorithm takes the form of a controller that integrates unbiased estimators for both fairness and utility, dynamically adapting both as more data becomes available. In addition to its rigorous theoretical foundation and convergence guarantees, we find empirically that the algorithm is highly practical and robust.