17 accepted papers
This paper surveys studies on the use of neural networks for optimization in the training-data-free setting. Specifically, we examine the dataless application of neural network architectures in optimization by re-parameterizing problems using fully connected (or MLP), convolutional, graph, and quadr
We study concept-level forgetting in pretrained vision models: removing an entire semantic category so the system no longer recognizes that object in unseen images and contexts, rather than merely forgetting specific training examples. Prior work either applies blunt global projections or fine-tunes
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in human–AI collaborative decision-making systems, where they are expected to align precise formal representations with ambiguous natural language. However, their ad hoc strategies for resolving ambiguity often lead to hallucinations and inconsi…
Combinatorial Optimization (CO) addresses many important problems, including the challenging Maximum Independent Set (MIS) problem. Alongside exact and heuristic solvers, differentiable approaches have emerged, often using continuous relaxations of quadratic objectives. Noting that an MIS in a graph…
Actor-critic methods for decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) facilitate collaborative optimal decision making without centralized coordination, thus enabling a wide range of applications in practice. To date, however, most theoretical convergence studies for existing actor-critic…
Planning in non-Markovian environments often requires inferring task structures, such as reward machines, through interactions with the environment. Traditional active grammatical inference methods, like Angluin’s L<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/19…
With the widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for visual-reasoning tasks, improving their safety has become crucial. Recent research indicates that despite training-time safety alignment, these models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks--carefully crafted image-prompt…
We address the problem of video question answering (video QA) with temporal grounding in a weakly supervised setup, without any temporal annotations. Given a video and a question, we generate an open-ended answer grounded with the start and end time. For this task, we propose TOGA: a vision-language…
We present a modular approach to reinforcement learning (RL) in environments consisting of simpler components evolving in parallel. A monolithic view of such modular environments may be prohibitively large to learn, or may require unrealizable communication between the components in the form of a ce…
Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free setting. We first theoretically characterize the structure of so…
In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on discounted MDPs, robust average-reward MDPs remain largely unex…
Responsible integration of deep neural networks into the design of trustworthy systems requires the ability to explain decisions made by these models. Explainability and transparency are critical for system analysis, certification, and human-machine teaming. We have recently demonstrated that neural…
Neural SDEs with Brownian motion as noise lead to smoother attributions than traditional ResNets. Various attribution methods such as saliency maps, integrated gradients, DeepSHAP and DeepLIFT have been shown to be more robust for neural SDEs than for ResNets using the recently proposed sensitivity…
Adversarial attacks can drastically reduce the accuracy and confidence level of classifiers while being imperceptible. Existing studies on the topic have largely focused on one-stage classifiers. In this paper, we study the robustness of two Two-Stage Hierarchical Classifier models, the flat and top…
Reinforcement learning and planning have been revolutionized in recent years, due in part to the mass adoption of deep convolutional neural networks and the resurgence of powerful methods to refine decision-making policies. However, the problem of sparse reward signals and their representation remai…
Several methods have recently been developed for computing attributions of a neural network's prediction over the input features. However, these existing approaches for computing attributions are noisy and not robust to small perturbations of the input. This paper uses the recently identified connec…
The formal synthesis of automated or autonomous agents has elicited strong interest from the artificial intelligence community in recent years. This problem space broadly entails the derivation of decision-making policies for agents acting in an environment such that a formal specification of behavi…