Magic: the Gathering is as Hard as Arithmetic

Magic: the Gathering is a popular and famously complicated card game about magical combat. Recently, several authors including Chatterjee and Ibsen-Jensen (2016) and Churchill, Biderman, and Herrick (2019) have investigated the computational complexity of playing Magic optimally. In this paper we show that the ``mate-in-$n$'' problem for Magic is $\Delta^0_n$-hard and that optimal play in two-player Magic is non-arithmetic in general. These results apply to how real Magic is played, can be achieved using standard-size tournament legal decks, and do not rely on stochasticity or hidden information. Our paper builds upon the construction that Churchill, Biderman, and Herrick (2019) used to show that this problem was at least as hard as the halting problem.

Summarizing Strategy Card Game AI Competition

This paper concludes five years of AI competitions based on Legends of Code and Magic (LOCM), a small Collectible Card Game (CCG), designed with the goal of supporting research and algorithm development. The game was used in a number of events, including Community Contests on the CodinGame platform, and Strategy Card Game AI Competition at the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Conference on Games. LOCM has been used in a number of publications related to areas such as game tree search algorithms, neural networks, evaluation functions, and CCG deckbuilding. We present the rules of the game, the history of organized competitions, and a listing of the participant and their approaches, as well as some general advice on organizing AI competitions for the research community. Although the COG 2022 edition was announced to be the last one, the game remains available and can be played using an online leaderboard arena.

Magic ELF: Image Deraining Meets Association Learning and Transformer

Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer have achieved great success in multimedia applications. However, little effort has been made to effectively and efficiently harmonize these two architectures to satisfy image deraining. This paper aims to unify these two architectures to take advantage of their learning merits for image deraining. In particular, the local connectivity and translation equivariance of CNN and the global aggregation ability of self-attention (SA) in Transformer are fully exploited for specific local context and global structure representations. Based on the observation that rain distribution reveals the degradation location and degree, we introduce degradation prior to help background recovery and accordingly present the association refinement deraining scheme. A novel multi-input attention module (MAM) is proposed to associate rain perturbation removal and background recovery. Moreover, we equip our model with effective depth-wise separable convolutions to learn the specific feature representations and trade off computational complexity. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method (dubbed as ELF) outperforms the state-of-the-art approach (MPRNet) by 0.25 dB on average, but only accounts for 11.7\% and 42.1\% of its computational cost and parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/kuijiang94/Magic-ELF.

InDL: A New Dataset and Benchmark for In-Diagram Logic Interpretation based on Visual Illusion

This paper introduces a novel approach to evaluating deep learning models' capacity for in-diagram logic interpretation. Leveraging the intriguing realm of visual illusions, we establish a unique dataset, InDL, designed to rigorously test and benchmark these models. Deep learning has witnessed remarkable progress in domains such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, models often stumble in tasks requiring logical reasoning due to their inherent 'black box' characteristics, which obscure the decision-making process. Our work presents a new lens to understand these models better by focusing on their handling of visual illusions -- a complex interplay of perception and logic. We utilize six classic geometric optical illusions to create a comparative framework between human and machine visual perception. This methodology offers a quantifiable measure to rank models, elucidating potential weaknesses and providing actionable insights for model improvements. Our experimental results affirm the efficacy of our benchmarking strategy, demonstrating its ability to effectively rank models based on their logic interpretation ability. As part of our commitment to reproducible research, the source code and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/rabbit-magic-wh/InDL

Looks Like Magic: Transfer Learning in GANs to Generate New Card Illustrations

In this paper, we propose MAGICSTYLEGAN and MAGICSTYLEGAN-ADA - both incarnations of the state-of-the-art models StyleGan2 and StyleGan2 ADA - to experiment with their capacity of transfer learning into a rather different domain: creating new illustrations for the vast universe of the game "Magic: The Gathering" cards. This is a challenging task especially due to the variety of elements present in these illustrations, such as humans, creatures, artifacts, and landscapes - not to mention the plethora of art styles of the images made by various artists throughout the years. To solve the task at hand, we introduced a novel dataset, named MTG, with thousands of illustration from diverse card types and rich in metadata. The resulting set is a dataset composed by a myriad of both realistic and fantasy-like illustrations. Although, to investigate effects of diversity we also introduced subsets that contain specific types of concepts, such as forests, islands, faces, and humans. We show that simpler models, such as DCGANs, are not able to learn to generate proper illustrations in any setting. On the other side, we train instances of MAGICSTYLEGAN using all proposed subsets, being able to generate high quality illustrations. We perform experiments to understand how well pre-trained features from StyleGan2 can be transferred towards the target domain. We show that in well trained models we can find particular instances of noise vector that realistically represent real images from the dataset. Moreover, we provide both quantitative and qualitative studies to support our claims, and that demonstrate that MAGICSTYLEGAN is the state-of-the-art approach for generating Magic illustrations. Finally, this paper highlights some emerging properties regarding transfer learning in GANs, which is still a somehow under-explored field in generative learning research.

MAGIC: Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal inferenCe for Diverse and Unpaired Text-based Image Captioning

Text-based image captioning (TextCap) requires simultaneous comprehension of visual content and reading the text of images to generate a natural language description. Although a task can teach machines to understand the complex human environment further given that text is omnipresent in our daily surroundings, it poses additional challenges in normal captioning. A text-based image intuitively contains abundant and complex multimodal relational content, that is, image details can be described diversely from multiview rather than a single caption. Certainly, we can introduce additional paired training data to show the diversity of images' descriptions, this process is labor-intensive and time-consuming for TextCap pair annotations with extra texts. Based on the insight mentioned above, we investigate how to generate diverse captions that focus on different image parts using an unpaired training paradigm. We propose the Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal inferenCe (MAGIC) framework for diverse and unpaired TextCap. This framework can adaptively construct multiple multimodal relational graphs of images and model complex relationships among graphs to represent descriptive diversity. Moreover, a cascaded generative adversarial network is developed from modeled graphs to infer the unpaired caption generation in image-sentence feature alignment and linguistic coherence levels. We validate the effectiveness of MAGIC in generating diverse captions from different relational information items of an image. Experimental results show that MAGIC can generate very promising outcomes without using any image-caption training pairs.

The Magic of IF: Investigating Causal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models of Code

Causal reasoning, the ability to identify cause-and-effect relationship, is crucial in human thinking. Although large language models (LLMs) succeed in many NLP tasks, it is still challenging for them to conduct complex causal reasoning like abductive reasoning and counterfactual reasoning. Given the fact that programming code may express causal relations more often and explicitly with conditional statements like ``if``, we want to explore whether Code-LLMs acquire better causal reasoning abilities. Our experiments show that compared to text-only LLMs, Code-LLMs with code prompts are significantly better in causal reasoning. We further intervene on the prompts from different aspects, and discover that the programming structure is crucial in code prompt design, while Code-LLMs are robust towards format perturbations.

Latent Magic: An Investigation into Adversarial Examples Crafted in the Semantic Latent Space

Adversarial attacks against Deep Neural Networks(DNN) have been a crutial topic ever since \cite{goodfellow} purposed the vulnerability of DNNs. However, most prior works craft adversarial examples in the pixel space, following the $l_p$ norm constraint. In this paper, we give intuitional explain about why crafting adversarial examples in the latent space is equally efficient and important. We purpose a framework for crafting adversarial examples in semantic latent space based on an pre-trained Variational Auto Encoder from state-of-art Stable Diffusion Model\cite{SDM}. We also show that adversarial examples crafted in the latent space can also achieve a high level of fool rate. However, examples crafted from latent space are often hard to evaluated, as they doesn't follow a certain $l_p$ norm constraint, which is a big challenge for existing researches. To efficiently and accurately evaluate the adversarial examples crafted in the latent space, we purpose \textbf{a novel evaluation matric} based on SSIM\cite{SSIM} loss and fool rate.Additionally, we explain why FID\cite{FID} is not suitable for measuring such adversarial examples. To the best of our knowledge, it's the first evaluation metrics that is specifically designed to evaluate the quality of a adversarial attack. We also investigate the transferability of adversarial examples crafted in the latent space and show that they have superiority over adversarial examples crafted in the pixel space.

Large Language Models are In-Context Semantic Reasoners rather than Symbolic Reasoners

The emergent few-shot reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have excited the natural language and machine learning community over recent years. Despite of numerous successful applications, the underlying mechanism of such in-context capabilities still remains unclear. In this work, we hypothesize that the learned \textit{semantics} of language tokens do the most heavy lifting during the reasoning process. Different from human's symbolic reasoning process, the semantic representations of LLMs could create strong connections among tokens, thus composing a superficial logical chain. To test our hypothesis, we decouple semantics from the language reasoning process and evaluate three kinds of reasoning abilities, i.e., deduction, induction and abduction. Our findings reveal that semantics play a vital role in LLMs' in-context reasoning -- LLMs perform significantly better when semantics are consistent with commonsense but struggle to solve symbolic or counter-commonsense reasoning tasks by leveraging in-context new knowledge. The surprising observations question whether modern LLMs have mastered the inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning abilities as in human intelligence, and motivate research on unveiling the magic existing within the black-box LLMs. On the whole, our analysis provides a novel perspective on the role of semantics in developing and evaluating language models' reasoning abilities. Code is available at {\url{https://github.com/XiaojuanTang/ICSR}}.

Lifting the Curse of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models

Pretrained language models (LMs) have shown compelling performance on various downstream tasks, but unfortunately they require a tremendous amount of inference compute. Knowledge distillation finds a path to compress LMs to small ones with a teacher-student paradigm. However, when the capacity gap between the teacher and the student is large, a curse of capacity gap appears, invoking a deficiency in distilling LMs. While a few studies have been carried out to fill the gap, the curse is not yet well tackled. In this paper, we aim at lifting the curse of capacity gap via enlarging the capacity of the student without notably increasing the inference compute. Largely motivated by sparse activation regime of mixture of experts (MoE), we propose a mixture of minimal experts (MiniMoE), which imposes extra parameters to the student but introduces almost no additional inference compute. Experimental results on GLUE and CoNLL demonstrate the curse of capacity gap is lifted by the magic of MiniMoE to a large extent. MiniMoE also achieves the state-of-the-art performance at small FLOPs compared with a range of competitive baselines. With a compression rate as much as $\sim$50$\times$, MiniMoE preserves $\sim$95\% GLUE score of the teacher.