We consider the problem of learning personalized treatment policies that are externally valid or generalizable: they perform well in other target populations besides the experimental (or training) population from which data are sampled. We first show that welfare-maximizing policies for the experimental population are robust to shifts in the distribution of outcomes (but not characteristics) between the experimental and target populations. We then develop new methods for learning policies that are robust to shifts in outcomes and characteristics. In doing so, we highlight how treatment effect heterogeneity within the experimental population affects the generalizability of policies. Our methods may be used with experimental or observational data (where treatment is endogenous). Many of our methods can be implemented with linear programming.
Multimodal emotion recognition is an active research topic in artificial intelligence. Its primary objective is to integrate multi-modalities (such as acoustic, visual, and lexical clues) to identify human emotional states. Current works generally assume accurate emotion labels for benchmark datasets and focus on developing more effective architectures. But due to the inherent subjectivity of emotions, existing datasets often lack high annotation consistency, resulting in potentially inaccurate labels. Consequently, models built on these datasets may struggle to meet the demands of practical applications. To address this issue, it is crucial to enhance the reliability of emotion annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel task called ``\textbf{Explainable Multimodal Emotion Reasoning (EMER)}''. In contrast to previous works that primarily focus on predicting emotions, EMER takes a step further by providing explanations for these predictions. The prediction is considered correct as long as the reasoning process behind the predicted emotion is plausible. This paper presents our initial efforts on EMER, where we introduce a benchmark dataset, establish baseline models, and define evaluation metrics. Meanwhile, we observe the necessity of integrating multi-faceted capabilities to deal with EMER. Therefore, we propose the first multimodal large language model (LLM) in affective computing, called \textbf{AffectGPT}. We aim to tackle the long-standing challenge of label ambiguity and chart a path toward more reliable techniques. Furthermore, EMER offers an opportunity to evaluate the audio-video-text understanding capabilities of recent multimodal LLM. To facilitate further research, we make the code and data available at: //github.com/zeroQiaoba/AffectGPT.
Most of Continual Learning (CL) methods push the limit of supervised learning settings, where an agent is expected to learn new labeled tasks and not forget previous knowledge. However, these settings are not well aligned with real-life scenarios, where a learning agent has access to a vast amount of unlabeled data encompassing both novel (entirely unlabeled) classes and examples from known classes. Drawing inspiration from Generalized Category Discovery (GCD), we introduce a novel framework that relaxes this assumption. Precisely, in any task, we allow for the existence of novel and known classes, and one must use continual version of unsupervised learning methods to discover them. We call this setting Generalized Continual Category Discovery (GCCD). It unifies CL and GCD, bridging the gap between synthetic benchmarks and real-life scenarios. With a series of experiments, we present that existing methods fail to accumulate knowledge from subsequent tasks in which unlabeled samples of novel classes are present. In light of these limitations, we propose a method that incorporates both supervised and unsupervised signals and mitigates the forgetting through the use of centroid adaptation. Our method surpasses strong CL methods adopted for GCD techniques and presents a superior representation learning performance.
Formal methods were frequently shown to be effective and, perhaps because of that, practitioners are interested in using them more often. Still, these methods are far less applied than expected, particularly, in critical domains where they are strongly recommended and where they have the greatest potential. Our hypothesis is that formal methods still seem not to be applicable enough or ready for their intended use. In critical software engineering, what do we mean when we speak of a formal method? And what does it mean for such a method to be applicable both from a scientific and practical viewpoint? Based on what the literature tells about the first question, with this manifesto, we lay out a set of principles that when followed by a formal method give rise to its mature applicability in a given scope. Rather than exercising criticism of past developments, this manifesto strives to foster an increased use of formal methods to the maximum benefit.
The DARPA Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) program seeks to yield advances in artificial intelligence (AI) systems so that they are capable of learning (and improving) continuously, leveraging data on one task to improve performance on another, and doing so in a computationally sustainable way. Performers on this program developed systems capable of performing a diverse range of functions, including autonomous driving, real-time strategy, and drone simulation. These systems featured a diverse range of characteristics (e.g., task structure, lifetime duration), and an immediate challenge faced by the program's testing and evaluation team was measuring system performance across these different settings. This document, developed in close collaboration with DARPA and the program performers, outlines a formalism for constructing and characterizing the performance of agents performing lifelong learning scenarios.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
In order to overcome the expressive limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs), we propose the first method that exploits vector flows over graphs to develop globally consistent directional and asymmetric aggregation functions. We show that our directional graph networks (DGNs) generalize convolutional neural networks (CNNs) when applied on a grid. Whereas recent theoretical works focus on understanding local neighbourhoods, local structures and local isomorphism with no global information flow, our novel theoretical framework allows directional convolutional kernels in any graph. First, by defining a vector field in the graph, we develop a method of applying directional derivatives and smoothing by projecting node-specific messages into the field. Then we propose the use of the Laplacian eigenvectors as such vector field, and we show that the method generalizes CNNs on an n-dimensional grid, and is provably more discriminative than standard GNNs regarding the Weisfeiler-Lehman 1-WL test. Finally, we bring the power of CNN data augmentation to graphs by providing a means of doing reflection, rotation and distortion on the underlying directional field. We evaluate our method on different standard benchmarks and see a relative error reduction of 8\% on the CIFAR10 graph dataset and 11% to 32% on the molecular ZINC dataset. An important outcome of this work is that it enables to translate any physical or biological problems with intrinsic directional axes into a graph network formalism with an embedded directional field.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in representation learning on graphs and achieved state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, most existing GNNs are designed to learn node representations on the fixed and homogeneous graphs. The limitations especially become problematic when learning representations on a misspecified graph or a heterogeneous graph that consists of various types of nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose Graph Transformer Networks (GTNs) that are capable of generating new graph structures, which involve identifying useful connections between unconnected nodes on the original graph, while learning effective node representation on the new graphs in an end-to-end fashion. Graph Transformer layer, a core layer of GTNs, learns a soft selection of edge types and composite relations for generating useful multi-hop connections so-called meta-paths. Our experiments show that GTNs learn new graph structures, based on data and tasks without domain knowledge, and yield powerful node representation via convolution on the new graphs. Without domain-specific graph preprocessing, GTNs achieved the best performance in all three benchmark node classification tasks against the state-of-the-art methods that require pre-defined meta-paths from domain knowledge.
Graphs, which describe pairwise relations between objects, are essential representations of many real-world data such as social networks. In recent years, graph neural networks, which extend the neural network models to graph data, have attracted increasing attention. Graph neural networks have been applied to advance many different graph related tasks such as reasoning dynamics of the physical system, graph classification, and node classification. Most of the existing graph neural network models have been designed for static graphs, while many real-world graphs are inherently dynamic. For example, social networks are naturally evolving as new users joining and new relations being created. Current graph neural network models cannot utilize the dynamic information in dynamic graphs. However, the dynamic information has been proven to enhance the performance of many graph analytical tasks such as community detection and link prediction. Hence, it is necessary to design dedicated graph neural networks for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DGNN, a new {\bf D}ynamic {\bf G}raph {\bf N}eural {\bf N}etwork model, which can model the dynamic information as the graph evolving. In particular, the proposed framework can keep updating node information by capturing the sequential information of edges, the time intervals between edges and information propagation coherently. Experimental results on various dynamic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
We propose a Bayesian convolutional neural network built upon Bayes by Backprop and elaborate how this known method can serve as the fundamental construct of our novel, reliable variational inference method for convolutional neural networks. First, we show how Bayes by Backprop can be applied to convolutional layers where weights in filters have probability distributions instead of point-estimates; and second, how our proposed framework leads with various network architectures to performances comparable to convolutional neural networks with point-estimates weights. In the past, Bayes by Backprop has been successfully utilised in feedforward and recurrent neural networks, but not in convolutional ones. This work symbolises the extension of the group of Bayesian neural networks which encompasses all three aforementioned types of network architectures now.
This paper proposes a method to modify traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) into interpretable CNNs, in order to clarify knowledge representations in high conv-layers of CNNs. In an interpretable CNN, each filter in a high conv-layer represents a certain object part. We do not need any annotations of object parts or textures to supervise the learning process. Instead, the interpretable CNN automatically assigns each filter in a high conv-layer with an object part during the learning process. Our method can be applied to different types of CNNs with different structures. The clear knowledge representation in an interpretable CNN can help people understand the logics inside a CNN, i.e., based on which patterns the CNN makes the decision. Experiments showed that filters in an interpretable CNN were more semantically meaningful than those in traditional CNNs.