Long-tailed data distributions pose challenges for a variety of domains like e-commerce, finance, biomedical science, and cyber security, where the performance of machine learning models is often dominated by head categories while tail categories are inadequately learned. This work aims to provide a systematic view of long-tailed learning with regard to three pivotal angles: (A1) the characterization of data long-tailedness, (A2) the data complexity of various domains, and (A3) the heterogeneity of emerging tasks.

The knowledge of protein interactions is crucial but challenging for drug discovery applications. This work focuses on protein interface prediction, which aims to determine whether a pair of residues from different proteins interact. Existing data-driven methods have made significant progress in effectively learning protein structures. Nevertheless, they overlook the conformational changes (i.e., flexibility) within proteins upon binding, leading to poor generalization ability. In this paper, we regard the protein flexibility as an attack on the trained model and aim to defend against it for improved generalization. To fulfill this purpose, we propose ATProt, an adversarial training framework for protein representations to robustly defend against the attack of protein flexibility. ATProt can theoretically guarantee protein representation stability under complicated protein flexibility. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that ATProt consistently improves the performance for protein interface prediction. Moreover, our method demonstrates broad applicability, performing the best even when provided with testing structures from structure prediction models like ESMFold and AlphaFold2.

Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) have emerged as the de facto standard in graph representation learning. However, when it comes to link prediction, they are not always superior to simple heuristics such as Common Neighbor (CN). This discrepancy stems from a fundamental limitation: while MPNNs excel in node-level representation, they stumble with encoding the joint structural features essential to link prediction, like CN. To bridge this gap, we posit that, by harnessing the orthogonality of input vectors, pure message-passing can indeed capture joint structural features. Specifically, we study the proficiency of MPNNs in approximating CN heuristics. Based on our findings, we introduce the Message Passing Link Predictor (MPLP), a novel link prediction model. MPLP taps into quasiorthogonal vectors to estimate link-level structural features, all while preserving the node-level complexities. We conduct experiments on benchmark datasets from various domains, where our method consistently outperforms the baseline methods, establishing new state-of-the-arts.

The risk for lead exposure is disproportionately higher for children who are poor, non-Hispanic black, living in large metropolitan areas, or living in older housing. The CDC sets a national standard for blood lead levels in children. This value was established in 2012 to be 3.5 micrograms per decileter (µg/dL) of blood.

Hierarchical Bayesian bandit refers to the multi-task bandit problem in which bandit tasks are assumed to be drawn from the same distribution. In this work, we provide improved Bayes regret bounds for hierarchical Bayesian bandit algorithms in the multi-task linear bandit and semi-bandit settings. For the multi-task linear bandit, we first analyze the preexisting hierarchical Thompson sampling (HierTS) algorithm, and improve its gap-independent Bayes regret bound from O(m n log n log (mn)) to O(m n log n) in the case of infinite action set, with m being the number of tasks and n the number of iterations per task. In the case of finite action set, we propose a novel hierarchical Bayesian bandit algorithm, named hierarchical BayesUCB (HierBayesUCB), that achieves the logarithmic but gap-dependent regret bound O(m log (mn) log n) under mild assumptions. All of the above regret bounds hold in many variants of hierarchical Bayesian linear bandit problem, including when the tasks are solved sequentially or concurrently. Furthermore, we extend the aforementioned HierTS and HierBayesUCB algorithms to the multi-task combinatorial semi-bandit setting. Concretely, our combinatorial HierTS algorithm attains comparable Bayes regret bound O(m n log n) with respect to the latest one. Moreover, our combinatorial HierBayesUCB yields a sharper Bayes regret bound O(m log (mn) log n). Experiments are conducted to validate the soundness of our theoretical results for multi-task bandit algorithms.

The combination of the Bayesian game and learning has a rich history, with the idea of controlling a single agent in a system composed of multiple agents with unknown behaviors given a set of types, each specifying a possible behavior for the other agents. The idea is to plan an agent's own actions with respect to those types which it believes are most likely to maximize the payoff. However, the type beliefs are often learned from past actions and likely to be incorrect. With this perspective in mind, we consider an agent in a game with type predictions of other components, and investigate the impact of incorrect beliefs to the agent's payoff. In particular, we formally define a tradeoff between risk and opportunity by comparing the payoff obtained against the optimal payoff, which is represented by a gap caused by trusting or distrusting the learned beliefs. Our main results characterize the tradeoff by establishing upper and lower bounds on the Pareto front for both normal-form and stochastic Bayesian games, with numerical results provided.

Generative retrieval represents a novel approach to information retrieval. It uses an encoder-decoder architecture to directly produce relevant document identifiers (docids) for queries. While this method offers benefits, current approaches are limited to scenarios with binary relevance data, overlooking the potential for documents to have multi-graded relevance. Extending generative retrieval to accommodate multi-graded relevance poses challenges, including the need to reconcile likelihood probabilities for docid pairs and the possibility of multiple relevant documents sharing the same identifier.

Figure 1: Evaluation of T abEBM and other state-of-the-art tabular generative methods across six key metrics (larger area indicates better performance).

The challenge in object-based visual reasoning lies in generating concept representations that are both descriptive and distinct. Achieving this in an unsupervised manner requires human users to understand the model's learned concepts and, if necessary, revise incorrect ones. To address this challenge, we introduce the Neural Concept Binder (NCB), a novel framework for deriving both discrete and continuous concept representations, which we refer to as "concept-slot encodings". NCB employs two types of binding: "soft binding", which leverages the recent SysBinder mechanism to obtain object-factor encodings, and subsequent "hard binding", achieved through hierarchical clustering and retrieval-based inference. This enables obtaining expressive, discrete representations from unlabeled images. Moreover, the structured nature of NCB's concept representations allows for intuitive inspection and the straightforward integration of external knowledge, such as human input or insights from other AI models like GPT-4. Additionally, we demonstrate that incorporating the hard binding mechanism preserves model performance while enabling seamless integration into both neural and symbolic modules for complex reasoning tasks. We validate the effectiveness of NCB through evaluations on our newly introduced CLEVR-Sudoku dataset.

Despite the remarkable capabilities demonstrated by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in graph-related tasks, recent research has revealed the fairness vulnerabilities in GNNs when facing malicious adversarial attacks. However, all existing fairness attacks require manipulating the connectivity between existing nodes, which may be prohibited in reality. To this end, we introduce a Node Injectionbased Fairness Attack (NIFA), exploring the vulnerabilities of GNN fairness in such a more realistic setting. In detail, NIFA first designs two insightful principles for node injection operations, namely the uncertainty-maximization principle and homophily-increase principle, and then optimizes injected nodes' feature matrix to further ensure the effectiveness of fairness attacks. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets consistently demonstrate that NIFA can significantly undermine the fairness of mainstream GNNs, even including fairnessaware GNNs, by injecting merely 1% of nodes. We sincerely hope that our work can stimulate increasing attention from researchers on the vulnerability of GNN fairness, and encourage the development of corresponding defense mechanisms.