Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence: AAAI Publications
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AdaDPCC: Adaptive Rate Control and Rate-Distortion-Complexity Optimization for Dynamic Point Cloud Compression
Dynamic point cloud compression (DPCC) is crucial in applications like autonomous driving and AR/VR. Current compression methods face challenges with complexity management and rate control. This paper introduces a novel dynamic coding framework that supports variable bitrate and computational complexities. Our approach includes a slimmable framework with multiple coding routes, allowing for efficient Rate-Distortion-Complexity Optimization (RDCO) within a single model. To address data sparsity in inter-frame prediction, we propose the coarse-to-fine motion estimation and compensation module that deconstructs geometric information while expanding the perceptive field. Additionally, we propose a precise rate control module that content-adaptively navigates point cloud frames through various coding routes to meet target bitrates. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach reduces the average BD-Rate by 5.81% and improves the BD-PSNR by 0.42 dB compared to the state-of-the-art method, while keeping the average bitrate error at 0.40%. Moreover, the average coding time is reduced by up to 44.6% compared to D-DPCC, underscoring its efficiency in real-time and bitrate-constrained DPCC scenarios
Expand Horizon: Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Multi-Level Environment Inference
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used for node classification tasks, but when encountering distribution shifts due to environmental change in real-world scenarios, they tend to learn unstable correlations between features and labels. To overcome this dilemma, a powerful class of approaches views the environment as the root cause of those unstable correlations, thereby their key focus is to infer the environment involved, enabling the model to avoid capturing environment-sensitive correlations. However, their inferences rely solely on the single-level information from one low-hop ego-graph, neglecting both global information and multi-granularity information in local ego-graphs with different hops. Although applying deeper GNNs on the high-hop ego-graph could capture global information, it will bring the side effect of over-smoothing node representations. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Multi-Level Environment Inference model named MLEI, which effectively broadens the horizon of training GNNs under node-level distribution shifts. Specifically, MLEI first leverages a linear graph transformer to surpass the scope of ego-graph, efficiently enabling high-level global environment inference. This global environment is in turn used as an overview to assist layer-by-layer environment inference on local multi-hop ego-graphs. Finally, we combine the environment from global and local views and utilize the designed objective function to capture stable predictive patterns. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model achieves satisfactory performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods under various distribution shifts
Merging Mechanisms for Ads and Organic Items in E-commerce Platforms
In contemporary e-commerce platforms, search result pages display two types of items: ad items and organic items. Ad items are determined through an advertising auction system, while organic items are selected by a recommendation system. These systems have distinct optimization objectives, creating the challenge of effectively merging these two components. Recent research has explored merging mechanisms for e-commerce platforms, but none have simultaneously achieved all desirable properties: incentive compatibility, individual rationality, adaptability to multiple slots, integration of inseparable candidates, and avoidance of repeated exposure for ads and organic items. This paper addresses the design of a merging mechanism that satisfies all these properties. We first provide the necessary conditions for the optimal merging mechanisms. Next, we introduce two simple and effective mechanisms, termed the generalized fix mechanism and the generalized change mechanism. Finally, we theoretically prove that both mechanisms offer guaranteed approximation ratios compared to the optimal mechanism in both simplest and general settings
Equilibria of the Colonel Blotto Games with Costs
This paper studies a generalized variant of the Colonel Blotto game, referred to as the Colonel Blotto game with costs. Unlike the classic Colonel Blotto game, which imposes the use-it-or-lose-it budget assumption, the Colonel Blotto game with costs captures the strategic importance of costs related both to obtaining resources and assigning them across battlefields. We show that every instance of the Colonel Blotto game with costs is strategically equivalent to an instance of the zero-sum Colonel Blotto game with one additional battlefield. This enables the computation of Nash equilibria of the Colonel Blotto game with costs in polynomial time with respect to the game parameters: the number of battlefields plus the number of resources available to the players
Decentralized Convergence to Equilibrium Prices in Trading Networks
We propose a decentralized market model in which agents can negotiate bilateral contracts. This builds on a similar, but centralized, model of trading networks introduced by Hatfield et al. in 2013. Prior work has established that fully-substitutable preferences guarantee the existence of competitive equilibria which can be centrally computed. Our motivation comes from the fact that prices in markets such as over-the-counter markets and used car markets arise from decentralized negotiation among agents, which has left open an important question as to whether equilibrium prices can emerge from agent-to-agent bilateral negotiations. We design a best response dynamic intended to capture such negotiations between market participants. We assume fully substitutable preferences for market participants. In this setting, we provide proofs of convergence for sparse markets (covering many real world markets of interest), and experimental results for more general cases, demonstrating that prices indeed reach equilibrium, quickly, via bilateral negotiations. Our best response dynamic, and its convergence behavior, forms an important first step in understanding how decentralized markets reach, and retain, equilibrium
REM: A Scalable Reinforced Multi-Expert Framework for Multiplex Influence Maximization
In social online platforms, identifying influential seed users to maximize influence spread is a crucial as it can greatly diminish the cost and efforts required for information dissemination. While effective, traditional methods for Multiplex Influence Maximization (MIM) have reached their performance limits, prompting the emergence of learning-based approaches. These novel methods aim for better generalization and scalability for more sizable graphs but face significant challenges, such as (1) inability to handle unknown diffusion patterns and (2) reliance on high-quality training samples. To address these issues, we propose the Reinforced Expert Maximization framework (REM). REM leverages a Propagation Mixture of Experts technique to encode dynamic propagation of large multiplex networks effectively in order to generate enhanced influence propagation. Noticeably, REM treats a generative model as a policy to autonomously generate different seed sets and learn how to improve them from a Reinforcement Learning perspective. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that REM surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of influence spread, scalability, and inference time in influence maximization tasks
On the Consideration of AI Openness: Can Good Intent Be Abused?
Open source is a driving force behind scientific advancement. However, this openness is also a double-edged sword, with the inherent risk that innovative technologies can be misused for purposes harmful to society.
What is the likelihood that an open source AI model or dataset will be used to commit a real-world crime, and if a criminal does exploit it, will the people behind the technology be able to escape legal liability?
To address these questions, we explore a legal domain where individual choices can have a significant impact on society. Specifically, we build the EVE-v1 dataset that comprises 200 question-answer pairs related to criminal offenses based on 200 Korean precedents first to explore the possibility of malicious models emerging.
We further developed EVE-v2 using 600 fraud-related precedents to confirm the existence of malicious models that can provide harmful advice on a wide range of criminal topics to test the domain generalization ability. Remarkably, widely used open-source large-scale language models (LLMs) provide unethical and detailed information about criminal activities when fine-tuned with \oursall. We also take an in-depth look at the legal issues that malicious language models and their builders could realistically face. Our findings highlight the paradoxical dilemma that open source accelerates scientific progress, but requires great care to minimize the potential for misuse
Strong Empowered and Aligned Weak Mastered Annotation for Weak-to-Strong Generalization
The super-alignment problem of how humans can effectively supervise super-human AI has garnered increasing attention. Recent research has focused on investigating the weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) scenario as an analogy for super-alignment. This scenario examines how a pre-trained strong model, supervised by an aligned weak model, can outperform its weak supervisor. Despite good progress, current W2SG methods face two main issues: 1) The annotation quality is limited by the knowledge scope of the weak model; 2) It is risky to position the strong model as the final corrector.
To tackle these issues, we propose a ``Strong Empowered and Aligned Weak Mastered'' (SEAM) framework for weak annotations in W2SG. This framework can leverage the vast intrinsic knowledge of the pre-trained strong model to empower the annotation and position the aligned weak model as the annotation master. Specifically, the pre-trained strong model first generates principle fast-and-frugal trees for samples to be annotated, encapsulating rich sample-related knowledge. Then, the aligned weak model picks informative nodes based on the tree's information distribution for final annotations. Experiments on six datasets for preference tasks in W2SG scenarios validate the effectiveness of our proposed method
Partial Identifiability in Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Agents with Non-Exponential Discounting
The aim of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is to infer an agent's preferences from observing their behaviour. Usually, preferences are modelled as a reward function, R, and behaviour is modelled as a policy, pi. One of the central difficulties in IRL is that multiple preferences may lead to the same observed behaviour. That is, R is typically underdetermined by pi, which means that R is only partially identifiable. Recent work has characterised the extent of this partial identifiability for different types of agents, including optimal and Boltzmann-rational agents. However, work so far has only considered agents that discount future reward exponentially: this is a serious limitation, especially given that extensive work in the behavioural sciences suggests that humans are better modelled as discounting hyperbolically. In this work, we newly characterise partial identifiability in IRL for agents with non-exponential discounting: our results are in particular relevant for hyperbolical discounting, but they also more generally apply to agents that use other types of (non-exponential) discounting. We significantly show that generally IRL is unable to infer enough information about R to identify the correct optimal policy, which entails that IRL alone can be insufficient to adequately characterise the preferences of such agents
Sequence to Sequence Reward Modeling: Improving RLHF by Language Feedback
Aligning the behavior of Large language models (LLMs) with human intentions and values remains a critical challenge. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns LLMs by training a reward model (RM) on human preferences and fine-tuning the LLMs to maximize RM feedback. Despite its effectiveness and popularity, RLHF is prone to biased local optimization. It means RM fails to provide feedback that accurately aligns with human preference, causing LLMs to explore unexpected generalizations, and failing to achieve alignment objectives. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) reward modeling method. Its key insight is that learning from language feedback rather than scalar feedback improves RLHF without additional annotations. We replaced the reward modeling target from binary maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with sequence MLE. This method enables richer and fine-grained language feedback without additional annotations, models, or training stages. Our experiments demonstrated its effectiveness, specifically, reducing the refusal-to-response paradigm in single-turn safety dialogues and the long-response bias in text summarization tasks. We provide further analysis that seq2seq RM improves RLHF performance across 2B and 7B LLMs on 3 NLP tasks, achieving an average win rate of 76.9%. We further show that seq2seq RM can still improve the performance of RLHF under out-of-distribution prompts