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This paper proposes DeepSynth, a method for effective training of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents when the reward is sparse and non-Markovian, but at the same time progress towards the reward requires achieving an unknown sequence of high-level objectives. Our method employs a novel algorithm for synthesis of compact automata to uncover this sequential structure automatically. We synthesise a human-interpretable automaton from trace data collected by exploring the environment. The state space of the environment is then enriched with the synthesised automaton so that the generation of a control policy by deep RL is guided by the discovered structure encoded in the automaton. The proposed approach is able to cope  with both high-dimensional, low-level features and unknown sparse non-Markovian rewards. We have evaluated DeepSynth&#39;s performance in a set of experiments that includes the Atari game Montezuma&#39;s Revenge. Compared to existing approaches, we obtain a reduction of two orders of magnitude in the number of iterations required for policy synthesis, and also a significant improvement in scalability.

AAAI 2021

DeepSynth: Automata Synthesis for Automatic Task Segmentation in Deep Reinforcement Learning

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

This paper proposes DeepSynth, a method for effective training of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents when the reward is sparse and non-Markovian, but at the same time progress towards the reward requires achieving an unknown sequence of high-level objectives. Our method employs a novel algorithm for synthesis of compact automata to uncover this sequential structure automatically. We synthesise a human-interpretable automaton from trace data collected by exploring the environment. The state space of the environment is then enriched with the synthesised automaton so that the generation of a control policy by deep RL is guided by the discovered structure encoded in the automaton. The proposed approach is able to cope  with both high-dimensional, low-level features and unknown sparse non-Markovian rewards. We have evaluated DeepSynth's performance in a set of experiments that includes the Atari game Montezuma's Revenge. Compared to existing approaches, we obtain a reduction of two orders of magnitude in the number of iterations required for policy synthesis, and also a significant improvement in scalability.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Forecasting influenza in a timely manner aids health organizations and policymakers in adequate preparation and decision making. However, effective influenza forecasting still remains a challenge despite increasing research interest. It is even more challenging amidst the COVID pandemic, when the influenza-like illness (ILI) counts are affected by various factors such as symptomatic similarities with COVID-19 and shift in healthcare seeking patterns of the general population. Under the current pandemic, historical influenza models carry valuable expertise about the disease dynamics but face difficulties adapting. Therefore, we propose CALI-Net, a neural transfer learning architecture which allows us to 'steer' a historical disease forecasting model to new scenarios where flu and COVID co-exist. Our framework enables this adaptation by automatically learning when it should emphasize learning from COVID-related signals and when it should learn from the historical model. Thus, we exploit representations learned from historical ILI data as well as the limited COVID-related signals. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach is successful in adapting a historical forecasting model to the current pandemic. In addition, we show that success in our primary goal, adaptation, does not sacrifice overall performance as compared with state-of-the-art influenza forecasting approaches.

Steering a Historical Disease Forecasting Model under a Pandemic: Case of Flu and COVID-19

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PTLMs), such as BERT and its better variant RoBERTa, has been a common practice for advancing performance in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Recent advance in representation learning shows that isotropic (i.e., unit-variance and uncorrelated) embeddings can significantly improve performance on downstream tasks with faster convergence and better generalization. The isotropy of the pre-trained embeddings in PTLMs, however, is relatively under-explored. In this paper, we analyze the isotropy of the pre-trained [CLS] embeddings of PTLMs with straightforward visualization, and point out two major issues: high variance in their standard deviation, and high correlation between different dimensions. We also propose a new network regularization method, isotropic batch normalization (IsoBN) to address the issues, towards learning more isotropic representations in fine-tuning by dynamically penalizing dominating principal components. This simple yet effective fine-tuning method yields about 1.0 absolute increment on the average of seven NLU tasks.

IsoBN: Fine-Tuning BERT with Isotropic Batch Normalization

Vaccination is the primary intervention for controlling the spread of infectious diseases. A certain level of vaccination rate (referred to as "herd immunity'') is needed for this intervention to be effective. However, there are concerns that herd immunity might not be achieved due to an increasing level of hesitancy and opposition to vaccines. One of the primary reasons for this is the cost of non-conformance with one's peers. We use the framework of network coordination games to study the persistence of anti-vaccine sentiment in a population. We extend it to incorporate the opposing forces of the pressure of conforming to peers, herd-immunity and vaccination benefits. We study the structure of the equilibria in such games, and the characteristics of unvaccinated nodes. We also study Stackelberg strategies to reduce the number of nodes with anti-vaccine sentiment. Finally, we evaluate our results on different kinds of real world social networks.

Persistence of Anti-Vaccine Sentiment in Social Networks through Strategic Interactions

Successor-style representations have many advantages for reinforcement learning: for example, they can help an agent generalize from past experience to new goals, and they have been proposed as explanations of behavioral and neural data from human and animal learners. They also form a natural bridge between model-based and model-free RL methods: like the former they make predictions about future experiences, and like the latter they allow efficient prediction of total discounted rewards. However, successor-style representations are not optimized to generalize across policies: typically, we maintain a limited-length list of policies, and share information among them by representation learning or GPI. Successor-style representations also typically make no provision for gathering information or reasoning about latent variables. To address these limitations, we bring together ideas from predictive state representations, belief space value iteration, successor features, and convex analysis: we develop a new, general successor-style representation, together with a Bellman equation that connects multiple sources of information within this representation, including different latent states, policies, and reward functions. The new representation is highly expressive: for example, it lets us efficiently read off an optimal policy for a new reward function, or a policy that imitates a new demonstration. For this paper, we focus on exact computation of the new representation in small, known environments, since even this restricted setting offers plenty of interesting questions. Our implementation does not scale to large, unknown environments --- nor would we expect it to, since it generalizes POMDP value iteration, which is difficult to scale. However, we believe that future work will allow us to extend our ideas to approximate reasoning in large, unknown environments. We conduct experiments to explore which of the potential barriers to scaling are most pressing.

Successor Feature Sets: Generalizing Successor Representations across Policies

Machine learning techniques can be useful in applications such as credit approval and college admission. However, to be classified more favorably in such contexts, an agent may decide to strategically withhold some of her features, such as bad test scores.  This is a missing data problem with a twist: which data is missing depends on the chosen classifier, because the specific classifier is what may create the incentive to withhold certain feature values. We address the problem of training classifiers that are robust to this behavior.

We design three classification methods: MINCUT, Hill-Climbing (HC) and Incentive-Compatible Logistic Regression (IC-LR). We show that MINCUT is optimal when the true distribution of data is fully known. However, it can produce complex decision boundaries, and hence be prone to overfitting in some cases. Based on a characterization of truthful classifiers (i.e., those that give no incentive to strategically hide features), we devise a simpler alternative called HC which consists of a hierarchical ensemble of out-of-the-box classifiers, trained using a specialized hill-climbing procedure which we show to be convergent. For several reasons, MINCUT and HC are not effective in utilizing a large number of complementarily informative features. To this end, we present IC-LR, a modification of Logistic Regression that removes the incentive to strategically drop features. We also show that our algorithms perform well in experiments on real-world data sets, and present insights into their relative performance in different settings.

Classification with Strategically withheld Data

Partial multi-label learning (PML), which tackles the problem of learning multi-label prediction models from instances with overcomplete noisy annotations, has recently started gaining attention from the research community. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial learning model, PML-GAN, under a generalized encoder-decoder framework for partial multi-label learning. The PML-GAN model uses a disambiguation network to identify irrelevant labels and uses a multi-label prediction network to map the training instances to their disambiguated label vectors, while deploying a generative adversarial network as an inverse mapping from label vectors to data samples in the input feature space. The learning of the overall model corresponds to a minimax adversarial game, which enhances the correspondence of input features with the output labels in a bi-directional mapping. Extensive experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real-world partial multi-label datasets, while the proposed model demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance.

Adversarial Partial Multi-Label Learning with Label Disambiguation

The use of language is subject to variation over time as well as across social groups and knowledge domains, leading to differences even in the monolingual scenario. Such variation in word usage is often called lexical semantic change (LSC). The goal of LSC is to characterize and quantify language variations with respect to word meaning, to measure how distinct two language sources are (that is, people or language models). Because there is hardly any data available for such a task, most solutions involve unsupervised methods to align two embeddings and predict semantic change with respect to a distance measure. To that end, we propose a self-supervised approach to model lexical semantic change based on the perturbation of word vectors in the input corpora. We show that our method can be used for the detection of semantic change with any alignment method. Furthermore, it can be used to choose the landmark words to use in alignment and can lead to substantial improvements over the existing techniques for alignment.  We illustrate the utility of our techniques using experimental results on three different datasets, involving words with the same or different meanings. Our methods not only provide significant improvements but also can lead to novel findings for the LSC problem.

Fake it Till You Make it: Self-Supervised Semantic Shifts for Monolingual Word Embedding Tasks

We propose a novel Transformer encoder-based architecture with syntactical knowledge encoded for intent detection and slot filling. Specifically, we encode syntactic knowledge into the Transformer encoder by jointly training it to predict syntactic parse ancestors and part-of-speech of each token via multi-task learning. Our model is based on self-attention and feed-forward layers and does not require external syntactic information to be available at inference time. Experiments show that on two benchmark datasets, our models with only two Transformer encoder layers achieve state-of-the-art results. Compared to the previously best performed model without pre-training, our models achieve absolute F1 score and accuracy improvement of 1.59 % and 0.85 % for slot filling and intent detection on the SNIPS dataset, respectively. Our models also achieve absolute F1 score and accuracy improvement of 0.1 % and 0.34 % for slot filling and intent detection on the ATIS dataset, respectively, over the previously best performed model. Furthermore, the visualization of the self-attention weights illustrates the benefits of incorporating syntactic information during training.

Encoding Syntactic Knowledge in Transformer Encoder for Intent Detection and Slot Filling

Supervised learning method requires a large volume of annotated datasets. Collecting such datasets is time-consuming and expensive. Until now, very few annotated COVID-19 imaging datasets are available. Although self-supervised learning enables us to bootstrap the training by exploiting  unlabeled data, the generic self-supervised methods for natural images do not sufficiently incorporate the context. For medical images, a desirable method should be sensitive enough to detect deviation from normal-appearing tissue of each anatomical region; here, anatomy is the context. We introduce a novel approach with two levels of self-supervised representation learning objectives: one on the regional anatomical level and another on the patient-level. We use graph neural networks to incorporate the relationship between different anatomical regions. The structure of the graph is informed by anatomical correspondences between each patient and an anatomical atlas. In addition, the graph representation has the advantage of handling any arbitrarily sized image in full resolution. Experiments on large-scale Computer Tomography (CT) datasets of lung images show that our approach compares favorably to baseline methods that do not account for the context. We use the learnt embedding to quantify the clinical progression of COVID-19 and show that our method generalizes well to COVID-19 patients from different hospitals. Qualitative results suggest that our model can identify clinically relevant regions in the images.

Context Matters: Graph-Based Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Medical Images

Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy maximization, while related advances in the field of economics instead assume the existence of unobserved action shocks to explain expert behavior (Nested Fixed Point Algorithm, Conditional Choice Probability method, Nested Pseudo-Likelihood Algorithm). In this work, we make previously unknown connections between these related methods from both fields. We achieve this by showing that they all belong to a class of optimization problems, characterized by a common form of the objective, the associated policy and the objective gradient. We demonstrate key computational and algorithmic differences which arise between the methods due to an approximation of the optimal soft value function, and describe how this leads to more efficient algorithms. Using insights which emerge from our study of this class of optimization problems, we identify various problem scenarios and investigate each method's suitability for these problems.

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Steering a Historical Disease Forecasting Model under a Pandemic: Case of Flu and COVID-19

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Steering a Historical Disease Forecasting Model under a Pandemic: Case of Flu and COVID-19

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Symbolic Task Inference in Deep Reinforcement Learning

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