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Imputation, Social Choice, and Partial Preferences

AAAI Conferences

Within the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, Vote (STV) select winners from sets of ballot. For example, the subfield of Computational Social Choice considers under plurality candidate X has won this election by virtue the application of AI techniques to problems in Social of having being at the top of the largest number of ballots. Under STV Y would win instead. Starting in the early 1990's, computer scientists began to In this work, we model voters as having partial orderings take an interest in social choice. Initial work was concerned over the candidates for their preferences, instead of linear with circumventing the impossibility results implied orderings.


On Dataless Hierarchical Text Classification

AAAI Conferences

In this paper, we systematically study the problem of dataless hierarchical text classification. Unlike standard text classification schemes that rely on supervised training, dataless classification depends on understanding the labels of the sought after categories and requires no labeled data. Given a collection of text documents and a set of labels, we show that understanding the labels can be used to accurately categorize the documents. This is done by embedding both labels and documents in a semantic space that allows one to compute meaningful semantic similarity between a document and a potential label. We show that this scheme can be used to support accurate multiclass classification without any supervision. We study several semantic representations and show how to improve the classification using bootstrapping. Our results show that bootstrapped dataless classification is competitive with supervised classification with thousands of labeled examples.


Sparse Compositional Metric Learning

AAAI Conferences

We propose a new approach for metric learning by framing it as learning a sparse combination of locally discriminative metrics that are inexpensive to generate from the training data. This flexible framework allows us to naturally derive formulations for global, multi-task and local metric learning. The resulting algorithms have several advantages over existing methods in the literature: a much smaller number of parameters to be estimated and a principled way to generalize learned metrics to new testing data points. To analyze the approach theoretically, we derive a generalization bound that justifies the sparse combination. Empirically, we evaluate our algorithms on several datasets against state-of-the-art metric learning methods. The results are consistent with our theoretical findings and demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of classification performance and scalability.


Propagating Regular Counting Constraints

AAAI Conferences

Constraints over finite sequences of variables are ubiquitous in sequencing and timetabling. This led to general modelling techniques and generic propagators, often based on deterministic finite automata (DFA) and their extensions. We consider counter-DFAs (cDFA), which provide concise models for regular counting constraints, that is constraints over the number of times a regular-language pattern occurs in a sequence. We show how to enforce domain consistency in polynomial time for at-most and at-least regular counting constraints based on the frequent case of a cDFA with only accepting states and a single counter that can be increased by transitions. We also show that the satisfaction of exact regular counting constraints is NP-hard and that an incomplete propagator for exact regular counting constraints is faster and provides more pruning than the existing propagator from (Beldiceanu, Carlsson, and Petit 2004). Finally, by avoiding the unrolling of the cDFA used by COSTREGULAR, the space complexity reduces from O(n ยท |ฮฃ| ยท |Q|) to O(n ยท (|ฮฃ| + |Q|)), where ฮฃ is the alphabet and Q the state set of the cDFA.


Modeling and Predicting Popularity Dynamics via Reinforced Poisson Processes

AAAI Conferences

Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, we lack forgotten over time (Wu and Humberman 2007). For example, a probabilistic framework to model and predict the popularity videos on YouTube or stories on Digg gain their popularity dynamics of individual items. The reason behind this is by striving for views or votes (Szabo and Huberman partly illustrated in Figure 1, suggesting that the dynamical 2010); papers increase their visibility by competing for citations processes governing individual items appear too noisy to be from new papers (Ren et al. 2010; Wang, Song, and amenable to quantification. Barabรกsi 2013); tweets or Hashtags in Twitter become more In this paper, we model the stochastic popularity dynamics popular as being retweeted (Hong, Dan, and Davison 2011) using reinforced Poisson processes, capturing simultaneously and so do webpages as being attached by incoming hyperlinks three key ingredients: fitness of an item, characterizing (Ratkiewicz et al. 2010). An ability to predict the popularity its inherent competitiveness against other items; a general of individual items within a dynamically evolving system temporal relaxation function, corresponding to the aging not only probes our understanding of complex systems, in the ability to attract new attentions; and a reinforcement but also has important implications in a wide range of domains, mechanism, documenting the well-known "rich-get-richer" from marketing and traffic control to policy making phenomenon. The benefit of the proposed model is threefold: and risk management. Despite recent advances of empirical (1) It models the arrival process of individual attentions methods, we lack a general modeling framework to predict directly in contrast to relying on aggregated popularity the popularity of individual items within a complex evolving time series; (2) As a generative probabilistic model, it can be system.


Incomplete Preferences in Single-Peaked Electorates

AAAI Conferences

Incomplete preferences are likely to arise in real-world preference aggregation and voting systems. This paper deals with determining whether an incomplete preference profile is single-peaked. This is essential information since many intractable voting problems become tractable for single-peaked profiles. We prove that for incomplete profiles the problem of determining single-peakedness is NP-complete. Despite this computational hardness result, we find four polynomial-time algorithms for reasonably restricted settings.


On Computing Optimal Strategies in Open List Proportional Representation: The Two Parties Case

AAAI Conferences

Open list proportional representation is an election mechanism used in many elections, including the 2012 Hong Kong Legislative Council Geographical Constituencies election. In this paper, we assume that there are just two parties in the election, and that the number of votes that a list would get is the sum of the numbers of votes that the candidates in the list would get if each of them would go alone in the election. Under these assumptions, we formulate the election as a mostly zero-sum game, and show that while the game always has a pure Nash equilibrium, it is NP-hard to compute it.


Beat the Cheater: Computing Game-Theoretic Strategies for When to Kick a Gambler out of a Casino

AAAI Conferences

Gambles in casinos are usually set up so that the casino makes a profit in expectation -- as long as gamblers play honestly. However, some gamblers are able to cheat, reducing the casinoโ€™s profit. How should the casino address this? A common strategy is to selectively kick gamblers out, possibly even without being sure that they were cheating. In this paper, we address the following question: Based solely on a gamblerโ€™s track record,when is it optimal for the casino to kick the gambler out? Because cheaters will adapt to the casinoโ€™s policy, this is a game-theoretic question. Specifically, we model the problem as a Bayesian game in which the casino is a Stackelberg leader that can commit to a (possibly randomized) policy for when to kick gamblers out, and we provide efficient algorithms for computing the optimal policy. Besides being potentially useful to casinos, we imagine that similar techniques could be useful for addressing related problems -- for example, illegal trades in financial markets.


Binary Aggregation by Selection of the Most Representative Voters

AAAI Conferences

Examples range from multiagent planning, That is, we look for the most representative voter and return to crowdsourcing and human computation, to collaborative her ballot as the outcome. In our example, a natural choice filtering for recommender systems, to rank aggregation would be any of the voters voting (0, 1, 1). The distance of for search engines, to coordination and resource allocation this choice to the individual ballots is 42 (21 voters disagree in multiagent systems. Several frameworks have been on 2 issues each), i.e., this solution is only marginally worse proposed in the literature on computational social choice than the solution returned by the distance-based rule--and it (Chevaleyre et al. 2007; Brandt, Conitzer, and Endriss 2013) is optimal in case (1, 1, 1) is infeasible.


On the Structure of Synergies in Cooperative Games

AAAI Conferences

We investigate synergy, or lack thereof, between agents in cooperative games, building on the popular notion of Shapley value. We think of a pair of agents as synergistic (resp., antagonistic) if the Shapley value of one agent when the other agent participates in a joint effort is higher (resp. lower) than when the other agent does not participate. Our main theoretical result is that any graph specifying synergistic and antagonistic pairs can arise even from a restricted class of cooperative games. We also study the computational complexity of determining whether a given pair of agents is synergistic. Finally, we use the concepts developed in the paper to uncover the structure of synergies in two real-world organizations, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.