Congratulations to the #IJCAI2024 distinguished paper award winners

The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) distinguished paper awards recognise some of the best papers presented at the conference each year. This year, during the conference opening ceremony, three articles were named as distinguished papers.

And the winners are…

Online Combinatorial Optimization with Group Fairness Constraints
Negin Golrezaei, Rad Niazadeh, Kumar Kshitij Patel and Fransisca Susan

Abstract: As digital marketplaces and services continue to expand, it is crucial to maintain a safe and fair environment for all users. This requires implementing fairness constraints into the sequential decision-making processes of these platforms to ensure equal treatment. However, this can be challenging as these processes often need to solve NP-complete problems with exponentially large decision spaces at each time step. To overcome this, we propose a general framework incorporating robustness and fairness into NP-complete problems, such as optimizing product ranking and maximizing submodular functions. Our framework casts the problem as a max-min game between a primal player aiming to maximize the platform’s objective and a dual player in charge of group fairness constraints. We show that one can trace the entire Pareto fairness curve by changing the thresholds on the fairness constraints. We provide theoretical guarantees for our method and empirically evaluate it, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Read the paper in full here.

Enhancing Controlled Query Evaluation Through Epistemic Policies
Gianluca Cima, Domenico Lembo, Lorenzo Marconi, Riccardo Rosati and Domenico Fabio Savo

Abstract: 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-Lite_R. 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.

Read the paper in full here.

Online Learning of Capacity-Based Preference Models
Margot Herin, Patrice Perny and Nataliya Sokolovska

Abstract: In multicriteria decision making, sophisticated decision models often involve a non-additive set function (named capacity) to define the weights of all subsets of criteria. This makes it possible to model criteria interactions, leaving room for a diversity of attitudes in criteria aggregation. Fitting a capacity-based decision model to a given Decision Maker is a challenging problem and several batch learning methods have been proposed in the literature to derive the capacity from a database of preference examples. In this paper, we introduce an online algorithm for learning a sparse representation of the capacity, designed for decision contexts where preference examples become available sequentially. Our method based on regularized dual averaging is also well fitted to decision contexts involving a large number of preference examples or a large number of criteria. Moreover, we propose a variant making it possible to include normative constraints on the capacity (e.g., monotonicity, supermodularity) while preserving scalability, based on the alternating direction method of multipliers.

Read the paper in full here.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.