Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence: AAAI Publications
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GLAD: Improving Latent Graph Generative Modeling with Simple Quantization
Learning graph generative models over latent spaces has received less attention compared to models that operate on the original data space and has so far demonstrated lacklustre performance. We present GLAD a latent space graph generative model. Unlike most previous latent space graph generative models, GLAD operates on a discrete latent space that preserves to a significant extent the discrete nature of the graph structures making no unnatural assumptions such as latent space continuity. We learn the prior of our discrete latent space by adapting diffusion bridges to its structure. By operating over an appropriately constructed latent space we avoid relying on decompositions that are often used in models that operate in the original data space. We present experiments on a series of graph benchmark datasets that demonstrates GLAD as the first equivariant latent graph generative method achieves competitive performance with the state of the art baselines
DualDynamics: Synergizing Implicit and Explicit Methods for Robust Irregular Time Series Analysis
Real-world time series analysis faces significant challenges when dealing with irregular and incomplete data. While Neural Differential Equation (NDE) based methods have shown promise, they struggle with limited expressiveness, scalability issues, and stability concerns. Conversely, Neural Flows offer stability but falter with irregular data. We introduce 'DualDynamics', a novel framework that synergistically combines NDE-based method and Neural Flow-based method. This approach enhances expressive power while balancing computational demands, addressing critical limitations of existing techniques. We demonstrate DualDynamics' effectiveness across diverse tasks: classification of robustness to dataset shift, irregularly-sampled series analysis, interpolation of missing data, and forecasting with partial observations. Our results show consistent outperformance over state-of-the-art methods, indicating DualDynamics' potential to advance irregular time series analysis significantly
Efficient Few-Shot Neural Architecture Search by Counting the Number of Nonlinear Functions
Neural architecture search (NAS) enables finding the best-performing architecture from a search space automatically. Most NAS methods exploit an over-parameterized network (i.e., a supernet) containing all possible architectures (i.e., subnets) in the search space. However, the subnets that share the same set of parameters are likely to have different characteristics, interfering with each other during training. To address this, few-shot NAS methods have been proposed that divide the space into a few subspaces and employ a separate supernet for each subspace to limit the extent of weight sharing. They achieve state-of-the-art performance, but the computational cost increases accordingly. We introduce in this paper a novel few-shot NAS method that exploits the number of nonlinear functions to split the search space. To be specific, our method divides the space such that each subspace consists of subnets with the same number of nonlinear functions. Our splitting criterion is efficient, since it does not require comparing gradients of a supernet to split the space. In addition, we have found that dividing the space allows us to reduce the channel dimensions required for each supernet, which enables training multiple supernets in an efficient manner. We also introduce a supernet-balanced sampling (SBS) technique, sampling several subnets at each training step, to train different supernets evenly within a limited number of training steps. Extensive experiments on standard NAS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach
Learning Deep Dissipative Dynamics
This study challenges strictly guaranteeing ``dissipativity'' of a dynamical system represented by neural networks learned from given time-series data.
Dissipativity is a crucial indicator for dynamical systems that generalizes stability and input-output stability, known to be valid across various systems including robotics, biological systems, and molecular dynamics.
By analytically proving the general solution to the nonlinear Kalman–Yakubovich–Popov (KYP) lemma, which is the necessary and sufficient condition for dissipativity, we propose a differentiable projection that transforms any dynamics represented by neural networks into dissipative ones and a learning method for the transformed dynamics.
Utilizing the generality of dissipativity, our method strictly guarantee stability, input-output stability, and energy conservation of trained dynamical systems.
Finally, we demonstrate the robustness of our method against out-of-domain input through applications to robotic arms and fluid dynamics
Two-Timescale Critic-Actor for Average Reward MDPs with Function Approximation
Several recent works have focused on carrying out non-asymptotic convergence analyses for AC algorithms. Recently, a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm has been presented for the discounted cost setting in the look-up table case where the timescales of the actor and the critic are reversed and only asymptotic convergence shown. In our work, we present the first two-timescale critic-actor algorithm with function approximation in the long-run average reward setting and present the first finite-time non-asymptotic as well as asymptotic convergence analysis for such a scheme. We obtain optimal learning rates and prove that our algorithm achieves a sample complexity that can be made arbitrarily close to that of single-timescale AC and clearly better than the one obtained for two-timescale AC in a similar setting.. A notable feature of our analysis is that we present the asymptotic convergence analysis of our scheme in addition to the finite-time bounds that we obtain and show the almost sure asymptotic convergence of the (slower) critic recursion to the attractor of an associated differential inclusion with actor parameters corresponding to local maxima of a perturbed average reward objective. We also show the results of numerical experiments on three benchmark settings and observe that our critic-actor algorithm performs the best amongst all algorithms
Leveraging Group Classification with Descending Soft Labeling for Deep Imbalanced Regression
Deep imbalanced regression (DIR), where the target values have a highly skewed distribution and are also continuous, is an intriguing yet under-explored problem in machine learning.
While recent works have already shown that incorporating various classification-based regularizers can produce enhanced outcomes, the role of classification remains elusive in DIR.
Moreover, such regularizers (e.g., contrastive penalties) merely focus on learning discriminative features of data, which inevitably results in ignorance of either continuity or similarity across the data.
To address these issues, we first bridge the connection between the objectives of DIR and classification from a Bayesian perspective.
Consequently, this motivates us to decompose the objective of DIR into a combination of classification and regression tasks, which naturally guides us toward a divide-and-conquer manner to solve the DIR problem.
Specifically, by aggregating the data at nearby labels into the same groups, we introduce an ordinal group-aware contrastive learning loss along with a multi-experts regressor to tackle the different groups of data thereby maintaining the data continuity.
Meanwhile, considering the similarity between the groups, we also propose a symmetric descending soft labeling strategy to exploit the intrinsic similarity across the data, which allows classification to facilitate regression more effectively.
Extensive experiments on real-world datasets also validate the effectiveness of our method
Cherry-Picking in Time Series Forecasting: How to Select Datasets to Make Your Model Shine
The importance of time series forecasting drives continuous research and the development of new approaches to tackle this problem. Typically, these methods are introduced through empirical studies that frequently claim superior accuracy for the proposed approaches. Nevertheless, concerns are rising about the reliability and generalizability of these results due to limitations in experimental setups. This paper addresses a critical limitation: the number and representativeness of the datasets used.
We investigate the impact of dataset selection bias, particularly the practice of cherry-picking datasets, on the performance evaluation of forecasting methods. Through empirical analysis with a diverse set of benchmark datasets, our findings reveal that cherry-picking datasets can significantly distort the perceived performance of methods, often exaggerating their effectiveness.
Furthermore, our results demonstrate that by selectively choosing just four datasets — what most studies report — 46% of methods could be deemed best in class, and 77% could rank within the top three. Additionally, recent deep learning-based approaches show high sensitivity to dataset selection, whereas classical methods exhibit greater robustness. Finally, our results indicate that, when empirically validating forecasting algorithms on a subset of the benchmarks, increasing the number of datasets tested from 3 to 6 reduces the risk of incorrectly identifying an algorithm as the best one by approximately 40%.
Our study highlights the critical need for comprehensive evaluation frameworks that more accurately reflect real-world scenarios. Adopting such frameworks will ensure the development of robust and reliable forecasting methods
A Robust Prototype-Based Network with Interpretable RBF Classifier Foundations
Prototype-based classification learning methods are known to be inherently interpretable. However, this paradigm suffers from major limitations compared to deep models, such as lower performance. This led to the development of the so-called deep Prototype-Based Networks (PBNs), also known as prototypical parts models. In this work, we analyze these models with respect to different properties, including interpretability. In particular, we focus on the Classification-by-Components (CBC) approach, which uses a probabilistic model to ensure interpretability and can be used as a shallow or deep architecture. We show that this model has several shortcomings, like creating contradicting explanations. Based on these findings, we propose an extension of CBC that solves these issues. Moreover, we prove that this extension has robustness guarantees and derive a loss that optimizes robustness. Additionally, our analysis shows that most (deep) PBNs are related to (deep) RBF classifiers, which implies that our robustness guarantees generalize to shallow RBF classifiers. The empirical evaluation demonstrates that our deep PBN yields state-of-the-art classification accuracy on different benchmarks while resolving the interpretability shortcomings of other approaches. Further, our shallow PBN variant outperforms other shallow PBNs while being inherently interpretable and exhibiting provable robustness guarantees
LazyDiT: Lazy Learning for the Acceleration of Diffusion Transformers
Diffusion Transformers have emerged as the preeminent models for a wide array of generative tasks, demonstrating superior performance and efficacy across various applications. The promising results come at the cost of slow inference, as each denoising step requires running the whole transformer model with a large amount of parameters. In this paper, we show that performing the full computation of the model at each diffusion step is unnecessary, as some computations can be skipped by lazily reusing the results of previous steps. Furthermore, we show that the lower bound of similarity between outputs at consecutive steps is notably high, and this similarity can be linearly approximated using the inputs. To verify our demonstrations, we propose the **LazyDiT**, a lazy learning framework that efficiently leverages cached results from earlier steps to skip redundant computations. Specifically, we incorporate lazy learning layers into the model, effectively trained to maximize laziness, enabling dynamic skipping of redundant computations. Experimental results show that LazyDiT outperforms the DDIM sampler across multiple diffusion transformer models at various resolutions. Furthermore, we implement our method on mobile devices, achieving better performance than DDIM with similar latency
Reputation-aware Revenue Allocation for Auction-based Federated Learning
Auction-based Federated Learning (AFL) has gained significant research interest due to its ability to incentivize data owners (DOs) to participate in FL model training tasks of data consumers (DCs) through economic mechanisms via the auctioneer. One of the critical research issues in AFL is decision support for the auctioneer. Existing approaches are based on the simplified assumption of a single, monopolistic AFL marketplace, which is unrealistic in real-world scenarios where multiple AFL marketplaces can co-exist and compete for the same pool of DOs. In this paper, we relax this assumption and frame the AFL auctioneer decision support problem from the perspective of helping them attract participants in a competitive AFL marketplace environment while safeguarding profit. To achieve this objective, we propose the Auctioneer Revenue Allocation Strategy for AFL (ARAS-AFL). We design the concepts of the attractiveness and competitiveness from the perspective of autioneer reputation. Based on the Lyapunov optimization, ARAS-AFL helps individual AFL auctioneer achieve the dual objective of balancing the reputation management costs and its own profit by designing a dynamic revenue allocation strategy. It takes into account both the auctioneer’s revenue and the changes in the number of participants on the AFL marketplace. Through extensive experiments on widely used benchmark datasets, ARAS-AFL demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. It outperforms the best baseline by 49.06%, 98.69%, 10.32%, and 4.77% in terms of total revenue, number of data owners, public reputation and accuracy of federated learning models, respectively