Congratulations to the #AAAI2021 best paper winners

The AAAI-21 best paper awards were announced on Thursday 4th February during the opening ceremony of AAAI 2021. There were three best papers, three best paper runners-up, and six distinguished papers.

AAAI-21 best papers

Informer: beyond efficient transformer for long sequence timer-series forecasting
Haoyi Zhou, Shanghang Zhang, Jieqi Peng, Shuai Zhang, Jianxin Li, Hui Xiong, Wancai Zhang

Abstract

Many real-world applications require the prediction of long sequence time-series, such as electricity consumption planning. Long sequence time-series forecasting (LSTF) demands a high prediction capacity of the model, which is the ability to capture precise long-range dependency coupling between output and input efficiently. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer to increase the prediction capacity. However, there are several severe issues with Transformer that prevent it from being directly applicable to LSTF, such as quadratic time complexity, high memory usage, and inherent limitation of the encoder-decoder architecture. To address these issues, we design an efficient transformer-based model for LSTF, named Informer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) a ProbSparse Self-attention mechanism, which achieves O(LlogL) in time complexity and memory usage, and has comparable performance on sequences’ dependency alignment. (ii) the self-attention distilling highlights dominating attention by halving cascading layer input, and efficiently handles extreme long input sequences. (iii) the generative style decoder, while conceptually simple, predicts the long time-series sequences at one forward operation rather than a step-by-step way, which drastically improves the inference speed of long-sequence predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that Informer significantly outperforms existing methods and provides a new solution to the LSTF problem.

Read the full paper on arXiv.

Exploration-exploitation in multi-agent learning: catastrophe theory meets game theory
Stefanos Leonardos, Georgios Piliouras

Abstract

Exploration-exploitation is a powerful and practical tool in multi-agent learning (MAL), however, its effects are far from understood. To make progress in this direction, we study a smooth analogue of Q-learning. We start by showing that our learning model has strong theoretical justification as an optimal model for studying exploration-exploitation. Specifically, we prove that smooth Q-learning has bounded regret in arbitrary games for a cost model that explicitly captures the balance between game and exploration costs and that it always converges to the set of quantal-response equilibria (QRE), the standard solution concept for games under bounded rationality, in weighted potential games with heterogeneous learning agents. In our main task, we then turn to measure the effect of exploration in collective system performance. We characterize the geometry of the QRE surface in low-dimensional MAL systems and link our findings with catastrophe (bifurcation) theory. In particular, as the exploration hyperparameter evolves over-time, the system undergoes phase transitions where the number and stability of equilibria can change radically given an infinitesimal change to the exploration parameter. Based on this, we provide a formal theoretical treatment of how tuning the exploration parameter can provably lead to equilibrium selection with both positive as well as negative (and potentially unbounded) effects to system performance.

Read the full paper on arXiv.

Mitigating political bias in language models through reinforced calibration
Ruibo Liu, Chenyan Jia, Jason W Wei, Guangxuan Xu, Lili Wang, Soroush Vosoughi

Abstract

Current large-scale language models can be politically biased as a result of the data they are trained on, potentially causing serious problems when they are deployed in real-world settings. In this paper, we describe metrics for measuring political bias in GPT-2 generation and propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for mitigating political biases in generated text. By using rewards from word embeddings or a classifier, our RL framework guides debiased generation without having access to the training data or requiring the model to be retrained. In empirical experiments on three attributes sensitive to political bias (gender, location, and topic), our methods reduced bias according to both our metrics and human evaluation, while maintaining readability and semantic coherence.

AAAI-21 best paper runners-up

Learning from eXtreme bandit feedback
Romain Lopez, Inderjit S. Dhillon, Michael Jordan

Abstract

We study the problem of batch learning from bandit feedback in the setting of extremely large action spaces. Learning from extreme bandit feedback is ubiquitous in recommendation systems, in which billions of decisions are made over sets consisting of millions of choices in a single day, yielding massive observational data. In these large-scale real-world applications, supervised learning frameworks such as eXtreme Multi-label Classification (XMC) are widely used despite the fact that they incur significant biases due to the mismatch between bandit feedback and supervised labels. Such biases can be mitigated by importance sampling techniques, but these techniques suffer from impractical variance when dealing with a large number of actions. In this paper, we introduce a selective importance sampling estimator (sIS) that operates in a significantly more favorable bias-variance regime. The sIS estimator is obtained by performing importance sampling on the conditional expectation of the reward with respect to a small subset of actions for each instance (a form of Rao-Blackwellization). We employ this estimator in a novel algorithmic procedure—named Policy Optimization for eXtreme Models (POXM)—for learning from bandit feedback on XMC tasks. In POXM, the selected actions for the sIS estimator are the top-p actions of the logging policy, where p is adjusted from the data and is significantly smaller than the size of the action space. We use a supervised-to-bandit conversion on three XMC datasets to benchmark our POXM method against three competing methods: BanditNet, a previously applied partial matching pruning strategy, and a supervised learning baseline. Whereas BanditNet sometimes improves marginally over the logging policy, our experiments show that POXM systematically and significantly improves over all baselines.

Read the full paper on arXiv.

Self-attention attribution: interpreting information interactions inside transformer
Yaru Hao, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Ke Xu

Abstract

The great success of Transformer-based models benefits from the powerful multi-head self-attention mechanism, which learns token dependencies and encodes contextual information from the input. Prior work strives to attribute model decisions to individual input features with different saliency measures, but they fail to explain how these input features interact with each other to reach predictions. In this paper, we propose a self-attention attribution method to interpret the information interactions inside Transformer. We take BERT as an example to conduct extensive studies. Firstly, we apply self-attention attribution to identify the important attention heads, while others can be pruned with marginal performance degradation. Furthermore, we extract the most salient dependencies in each layer to construct an attribution tree, which reveals the hierarchical interactions inside Transformer. Finally, we show that the attribution results can be used as adversarial patterns to implement non-targeted attacks towards BERT.

Read the full paper on arXiv.

Dual-mandate patrols: multi-armed bandits for green security
Lily Xu, Elizabeth Bondi, Fei Fang, Andrew Perrault, Kai Wang, Milind Tambe

Abstract

Conservation efforts in green security domains to protect wildlife and forests are constrained by the limited availability of defenders (i.e., patrollers), who must patrol vast areas to protect from attackers (e.g., poachers or illegal loggers). Defenders must choose how much time to spend in each region of the protected area, balancing exploration of infrequently visited regions and exploitation of known hotspots. We formulate the problem as a stochastic multi-armed bandit, where each action represents a patrol strategy, enabling us to guarantee the rate of convergence of the patrolling policy. However, a naive bandit approach would compromise short-term performance for long-term optimality, resulting in animals poached and forests destroyed. To speed up performance, we leverage smoothness in the reward function and decomposability of actions. We show a synergy between Lipschitz-continuity and decomposition as each aids the convergence of the other. In doing so, we bridge the gap between combinatorial and Lipschitz bandits, presenting a no-regret approach that tightens existing guarantees while optimizing for short-term performance. We demonstrate that our algorithm, LIZARD, improves performance on real-world poaching data from Cambodia.

Read the full paper on arXiv.

AAAI-21 Distinguished Papers

On the tractability of SHAP explanations
Guy Van den Broeck, Anton Lykov, Maximilian Schleich, Dan Suciu

Abstract

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.

Read the full paper on arXiv.

Ethically compliant sequential decision making
Justin Svegliato, Samer Nashed, Shlomo Zilberstein

Abstract

Enabling autonomous systems to comply with an ethical theory is critical given their accelerating deployment in domains that impact society. While many ethical theories have been studied extensively in moral philosophy, they are still challenging to implement by developers who build autonomous systems. This paper proposes a novel approach for building ethically compliant autonomous systems that optimize completing a task while following an ethical framework. First, we introduce a definition of an ethically compliant autonomous system and its properties. Next, we offer a range of ethical frameworks for divine command theory, prima facie duties, and virtue ethics. Finally, we demonstrate the accuracy and usability of our approach in a set of autonomous driving simulations and a user study of planning and robotics experts.

Read the full paper on the author’s webpage here.

Self-supervised multi-view stereo via effective co-segmentation and data-augmentation
Hongbin Xu, Zhipeng Zhou, Yu Qiao, Wenxiong Kang, Qiuxia Wu

Abstract

Recent studies have witnessed that self-supervised methods based on view synthesis obtain clear progress on multi-view stereo (MVS). However, existing methods rely on the assumption that the corresponding points among different views share the same color, which may not always be true in practice. This may lead to unreliable self-supervised signal and harm the final reconstruction performance. To address the issue, we propose a framework integrated with more reliable supervision guided by semantic co-segmentation and data-augmentation. Specially, we excavate mutual semantic from multi-view images to guide the semantic consistency. And we devise effective data-augmentation mechanism which ensures the transformation robustness by treating the prediction of regular samples as pseudo ground truth to regularize the prediction of augmented samples. Experimental results on DTU dataset show that our proposed methods achieve the state-of-the-art performance among unsupervised methods, and even compete on par with supervised methods. Furthermore, extensive experiments on Tanks&Temples dataset demonstrate the effective generalization ability of the proposed method.

Expected eligibility traces
Hado van Hasselt, Sephora Madjiheurem, Matteo Hessel, Andre Barreto, David Silver, Diana Borsa

Abstract

The question of how to determine which states and actions are responsible for a certain outcome is known as the credit assignment problem and remains a central research question in reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence. Eligibility traces enable efficient credit assignment to the recent sequence of states and actions experienced by the agent, but not to counterfactual sequences that could also have led to the current state. In this work, we introduce expected eligibility traces. Expected traces allow, with a single update, to update states and actions that could have preceded the current state, even if they did not do so on this occasion. We discuss when expected traces provide benefits over classic (instantaneous) traces in temporal-difference learning, and show that sometimes substantial improvements can be attained. We provide a way to smoothly interpolate between instantaneous and expected traces by a mechanism similar to bootstrapping, which ensures that the resulting algorithm is a strict generalisation of TD(λ). Finally, we discuss possible extensions and connections to related ideas, such as successor features.

Read the full paper on arXiv.

Polynomial-time algorithms for counting and sampling Markov equivalent DAGs
Marcel Wienöbst, Max Bannach, Maciej Liskiewicz

Abstract

Counting and uniform sampling of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from a Markov equivalence class are fundamental tasks in graphical causal analysis. In this paper, we show that these tasks can be performed in polynomial time, solving a long-standing open problem in this area. Our algorithms are effective and easily implementable. Experimental results show that the algorithms significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods.

Read the full paper on arXiv.

IQ — incremental learning for solving QSAT
Thomas L Lee, Viktor Tóth, Sean B Holden

Abstract

Solvers for the quantified satisfiability (QSAT) problem based on the method of counterexample guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR) have proven highly competitive. Recently the solver QFUN has demonstrated that machine learning can be successfully exploited in this context. QFUN uses decision tree learners periodically, to learn from moves and countermoves in the game-theoretic formulation of QSAT, and thereby infers strategies that are added to a partially expanded QSAT formula within the CEGAR framework. We describe IQ, a new QSAT solver that further develops this idea. IQ replaces the batch learning of decision trees with the incremental learning of decision lists; however its key innovation is in how these are exploited. IQ tracks the performance of these incremental learners at each increment, measured by how successful they are at predicting known countermoves. This allows it to make informed decisions as to when good strategies have been learned before incorporating them. In this way it avoids committing resources to batch learning steps for which it can not be known in advance whether or not the learner will yield a good strategy. Thus it avoids using resources for the inference of ineffective strategies, as well as the problems associated with adding ineffective strategies into the expansion. We evaluated IQ using the full 2018 and 2019 problem sets for the prenex nonCNF track of QBFEVAL—the annual competitive evaluation event for QBF solvers—and found that it significantly outperformed both QFUN and QuAbS, the latter of which was the overall competition winner for this track in both years

Lucy Smith , Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith , Managing Editor for AIhub.