OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning: A Unifying Algorithm
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Unifying seemingly disparate algorithmic ideas to produce better performing algorithms has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning. As a primary example, TD($λ$) elegantly unifies one-step TD prediction with Monte Carlo methods through the use of eligibility traces and the trace-decay parameter $λ$. Currently, there are a multitude of algorithms that can be used to perform TD control, including Sarsa, $Q$-learning, and Expected Sarsa. These methods are often studied in the one-step case, but they can be extended across multiple time steps to achieve better performance. Each of these algorithms is seemingly distinct, and no one dominates the others for all problems. In this paper, we study a new multi-step action-value algorithm called $Q(σ)$ which unifies and generalizes these existing algorithms, while subsuming them as special cases. A new parameter, $σ$, is introduced to allow the degree of sampling performed by the algorithm at each step during its backup to be continuously varied, with Sarsa existing at one extreme (full sampling), and Expected Sarsa existing at the other (pure expectation). $Q(σ)$ is generally applicable to both on- and off-policy learning, but in this work we focus on experiments in the on-policy case. Our results show that an intermediate value of $σ$, which results in a mixture of the existing algorithms, performs better than either extreme. The mixture can also be varied dynamically which can result in even greater performance.
DeepHeart: Semi-Supervised Sequence Learning for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

We train and validate a semi-supervised, multi-task LSTM on 57,675 person-weeks of data from off-the-shelf wearable heart rate sensors, showing high accuracy at detecting multiple medical conditions, including diabetes (0.8451), high cholesterol (0.7441), high blood pressure (0.8086), and sleep apnea (0.8298). We compare two semi-supervised train- ing methods, semi-supervised sequence learning and heuristic pretraining, and show they outperform hand-engineered biomarkers from the medical literature. We believe our work suggests a new approach to patient risk stratification based on cardiovascular risk scores derived from popular wearables such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, or Android Wear.
Planning With Pixels in (Almost) Real Time
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, width-based planning methods have been shown to yield state-of-the-art results in the Atari 2600 video games. For this, the states were associated with the (RAM) memory states of the simulator. In this work, we consider the same planning problem but using the screen instead. By using the same visual inputs, the planning results can be compared with those of humans and learning methods. We show that the planning approach, out of the box and without training, results in scores that compare well with those obtained by humans and learning methods, and moreover, by developing an episodic, rollout version of the IW(k) algorithm, we show that such scores can be obtained in almost real time.
Table-to-Text: Describing Table Region With Natural Language
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we present a generative model to generate a natural language sentence describing a table region, e.g., a row. The model maps a row from a table to a continuous vector and then generates a natural language sentence by leveraging the semantics of a table. To deal with rare words appearing in a table, we develop a flexible copying mechanism that selectively replicates contents from the table in the output sequence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the model and the power of the copying mechanism. On two synthetic datasets, WIKIBIO and SIMPLEQUESTIONS, our model improves the current state-of-the-art BLEU-4 score from 34.70 to 40.26 and from 33.32 to 39.12, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce an open-domain dataset WIKITABLETEXT including 13,318 explanatory sentences for 4,962 tables. Our model achieves a BLEU-4 score of 38.23, which outperforms template based and language model based approaches.
Clustering - What Both Theoreticians and Practitioners Are Doing Wrong
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Unsupervised learning is widely recognized as one of the most important challenges facing machine learning nowa- days. However, in spite of hundreds of papers on the topic being published every year, current theoretical understanding and practical implementations of such tasks, in particular of clustering, is very rudimentary. This note focuses on clustering. I claim that the most signif- icant challenge for clustering is model selection. In contrast with other common computational tasks, for clustering, dif- ferent algorithms often yield drastically different outcomes. Therefore, the choice of a clustering algorithm, and their pa- rameters (like the number of clusters) may play a crucial role in the usefulness of an output clustering solution. However, currently there exists no methodical guidance for clustering tool-selection for a given clustering task. Practitioners pick the algorithms they use without awareness to the implications of their choices and the vast majority of theory of clustering papers focus on providing savings to the resources needed to solve optimization problems that arise from picking some concrete clustering objective. Saving that pale in com- parison to the costs of mismatch between those objectives and the intended use of clustering results. I argue the severity of this problem and describe some recent proposals aiming to address this crucial lacuna.
A Bayesian Clearing Mechanism for Combinatorial Auctions
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

We cast the problem of combinatorial auction design in a Bayesian framework in order to incorporate prior information into the auction process and minimize the number of rounds to convergence. We first develop a generative model of agent valuations and market prices such that clearing prices become maximum a posteriori estimates given observed agent valuations. This generative model then forms the basis of an auction process which alternates between refining estimates of agent valuations and computing candidate clearing prices. We provide an implementation of the auction using assumed density filtering to estimate valuations and expectation maximization to compute prices. An empirical evaluation over a range of valuation domains demonstrates that our Bayesian auction mechanism is highly competitive against the combinatorial clock auction in terms of rounds to convergence, even under the most favorable choices of price increment for this baseline.
Efficient Probabilistic Performance Bounds for Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy performance bounds in the inverse reinforcement learning setting---where the true reward function is unknown and only samples of expert behavior are given. We propose a sampling method based on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning that uses demonstrations to determine practical high-confidence upper bounds on the $α$-worst-case difference in expected return between any evaluation policy and the optimal policy under the expert's unknown reward function. We evaluate our proposed bound on both a standard grid navigation task and a simulated driving task and achieve tighter and more accurate bounds than a feature count-based baseline. We also give examples of how our proposed bound can be utilized to perform risk-aware policy selection and risk-aware policy improvement. Because our proposed bound requires several orders of magnitude fewer demonstrations than existing high-confidence bounds, it is the first practical method that allows agents that learn from demonstration to express confidence in the quality of their learned policy.
Knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation using Topic Models
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Word Sense Disambiguation is an open problem in Natural Language Processing which is particularly challenging and useful in the unsupervised setting where all the words in any given text need to be disambiguated without using any labeled data. Typically WSD systems use the sentence or a small window of words around the target word as the context for disambiguation because their computational complexity scales exponentially with the size of the context. In this paper, we leverage the formalism of topic model to design a WSD system that scales linearly with the number of words in the context. As a result, our system is able to utilize the whole document as the context for a word to be disambiguated. The proposed method is a variant of Latent Dirichlet Allocation in which the topic proportions for a document are replaced by synset proportions. We further utilize the information in the WordNet by assigning a non-uniform prior to synset distribution over words and a logistic-normal prior for document distribution over synsets. We evaluate the proposed method on Senseval-2, Senseval-3, SemEval-2007, SemEval-2013 and SemEval-2015 English All-Word WSD datasets and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised knowledge-based WSD system by a significant margin.
Gated-Attention Architectures for Task-Oriented Language Grounding
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

To perform tasks specified by natural language instructions, autonomous agents need to extract semantically meaningful representations of language and map it to visual elements and actions in the environment. This problem is called task-oriented language grounding. We propose an end-to-end trainable neural architecture for task-oriented language grounding in 3D environments which assumes no prior linguistic or perceptual knowledge and requires only raw pixels from the environment and the natural language instruction as input. The proposed model combines the image and text representations using a Gated-Attention mechanism and learns a policy to execute the natural language instruction using standard reinforcement and imitation learning methods. We show the effectiveness of the proposed model on unseen instructions as well as unseen maps, both quantitatively and qualitatively. We also introduce a novel environment based on a 3D game engine to simulate the challenges of task-oriented language grounding over a rich set of instructions and environment states.
Zero-Resource Neural Machine Translation with Multi-Agent Communication Game
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

While end-to-end neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved notable success in the past years in translating a handful of resource-rich language pairs, it still suffers from the data scarcity problem for low-resource language pairs and domains. To tackle this problem, we propose an interactive multimodal framework for zero-resource neural machine translation. Instead of being passively exposed to large amounts of parallel corpora, our learners (implemented as encoder-decoder architecture) engage in cooperative image description games, and thus develop their own image captioning or neural machine translation model from the need to communicate in order to succeed at the game. Experimental results on the IAPR-TC12 and Multi30K datasets show that the proposed learning mechanism significantly improves over the state-of-the-art methods.
IONet: Learning to Cure the Curse of Drift in Inertial Odometry
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Inertial sensors play a pivotal role in indoor localization, which in turn lays the foundation for pervasive personal applications. However, low-cost inertial sensors, as commonly found in smartphones, are plagued by bias and noise, which leads to unbounded growth in error when accelerations are double integrated to obtain displacement. Small errors in state estimation propagate to make odometry virtually unusable in a matter of seconds. We propose to break the cycle of continuous integration, and instead segment inertial data into independent windows. The challenge becomes estimating the latent states of each window, such as velocity and orientation, as these are not directly observable from sensor data. We demonstrate how to formulate this as an optimization problem, and show how deep recurrent neural networks can yield highly accurate trajectories, outperforming state-of-the-art shallow techniques, on a wide range of tests and attachments. In particular, we demonstrate that IONet can generalize to estimate odometry for non-periodic motion, such as a shopping trolley or baby-stroller, an extremely challenging task for existing techniques.
Meta Multi-Task Learning for Sequence Modeling
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Semantic composition functions have been playing a pivotal role in neural representation learning of text sequences. In spite of their success, most existing models suffer from the underfitting problem: they use the same shared compositional function on all the positions in the sequence, thereby lacking expressive power due to incapacity to capture the richness of compositionality. Besides, the composition functions of different tasks are independent and learned from scratch. In this paper, we propose a new sharing scheme of composition function across multiple tasks. Specifically, we use a shared meta-network to capture the meta-knowledge of semantic composition and generate the parameters of the task-specific semantic composition models. We conduct extensive experiments on two types of tasks, text classification and sequence tagging, which demonstrate the benefits of our approach. Besides, we show that the shared meta-knowledge learned by our proposed model can be regarded as off-the-shelf knowledge and easily transferred to new tasks.
LSTD: A Low-Shot Transfer Detector for Object Detection
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Recent advances in object detection are mainly driven by deep learning with large-scale detection benchmarks. However, the fully-annotated training set is often limited for a target detection task, which may deteriorate the performance of deep detectors. To address this challenge, we propose a novel low-shot transfer detector (LSTD) in this paper, where we leverage rich source-domain knowledge to construct an effective target-domain detector with very few training examples. The main contributions are described as follows. First, we design a flexible deep architecture of LSTD to alleviate transfer difficulties in low-shot detection. This architecture can integrate the advantages of both SSD and Faster RCNN in a unified deep framework. Second, we introduce a novel regularized transfer learning framework for low-shot detection, where the transfer knowledge (TK) and background depression (BD) regularizations are proposed to leverage object knowledge respectively from source and target domains, in order to further enhance fine-tuning with a few target images. Finally, we examine our LSTD on a number of challenging low-shot detection experiments, where LSTD outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. The results demonstrate that LSTD is a preferable deep detector for low-shot scenarios.
A Multilayer Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Neural Network for Grammatical Error Correction
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

We improve automatic correction of grammatical, orthographic, and collocation errors in text using a multilayer convolutional encoder-decoder neural network. The network is initialized with embeddings that make use of character N-gram information to better suit this task. When evaluated on common benchmark test data sets (CoNLL-2014 and JFLEG), our model substantially outperforms all prior neural approaches on this task as well as strong statistical machine translation-based systems with neural and task-specific features trained on the same data. Our analysis shows the superiority of convolutional neural networks over recurrent neural networks such as long short-term memory (LSTM) networks in capturing the local context via attention, and thereby improving the coverage in correcting grammatical errors. By ensembling multiple models, and incorporating an N-gram language model and edit features via rescoring, our novel method becomes the first neural approach to outperform the current state-of-the-art statistical machine translation-based approach, both in terms of grammaticality and fluency.
Using Syntax to Ground Referring Expressions in Natural Images
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce GroundNet, a neural network for referring expression recognition -- the task of localizing (or grounding) in an image the object referred to by a natural language expression. Our approach to this task is the first to rely on a syntactic analysis of the input referring expression in order to inform the structure of the computation graph. Given a parse tree for an input expression, we explicitly map the syntactic constituents and relationships present in the tree to a composed graph of neural modules that defines our architecture for performing localization. This syntax-based approach aids localization of \textit{both} the target object and auxiliary supporting objects mentioned in the expression. As a result, GroundNet is more interpretable than previous methods: we can (1) determine which phrase of the referring expression points to which object in the image and (2) track how the localization of the target object is determined by the network. We study this property empirically by introducing a new set of annotations on the GoogleRef dataset to evaluate localization of supporting objects. Our experiments show that GroundNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in identifying supporting objects, while maintaining comparable performance in the localization of target objects.
Diverse Exploration for Fast and Safe Policy Improvement
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

We study an important yet under-addressed problem of quickly and safely improving policies in online reinforcement learning domains. As its solution, we propose a novel exploration strategy - diverse exploration (DE), which learns and deploys a diverse set of safe policies to explore the environment. We provide DE theory explaining why diversity in behavior policies enables effective exploration without sacrificing exploitation. Our empirical study shows that an online policy improvement algorithm framework implementing the DE strategy can achieve both fast policy improvement and safe online performance.
PixelLink: Detecting Scene Text via Instance Segmentation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Most state-of-the-art scene text detection algorithms are deep learning based methods that depend on bounding box regression and perform at least two kinds of predictions: text/non-text classification and location regression. Regression plays a key role in the acquisition of bounding boxes in these methods, but it is not indispensable because text/non-text prediction can also be considered as a kind of semantic segmentation that contains full location information in itself. However, text instances in scene images often lie very close to each other, making them very difficult to separate via semantic segmentation. Therefore, instance segmentation is needed to address this problem. In this paper, PixelLink, a novel scene text detection algorithm based on instance segmentation, is proposed. Text instances are first segmented out by linking pixels within the same instance together. Text bounding boxes are then extracted directly from the segmentation result without location regression. Experiments show that, compared with regression-based methods, PixelLink can achieve better or comparable performance on several benchmarks, while requiring many fewer training iterations and less training data.
Convolutional 2D Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Link prediction for knowledge graphs is the task of predicting missing relationships between entities. Previous work on link prediction has focused on shallow, fast models which can scale to large knowledge graphs. However, these models learn less expressive features than deep, multi-layer models -- which potentially limits performance. In this work, we introduce ConvE, a multi-layer convolutional network model for link prediction, and report state-of-the-art results for several established datasets. We also show that the model is highly parameter efficient, yielding the same performance as DistMult and R-GCN with 8x and 17x fewer parameters. Analysis of our model suggests that it is particularly effective at modelling nodes with high indegree -- which are common in highly-connected, complex knowledge graphs such as Freebase and YAGO3. In addition, it has been noted that the WN18 and FB15k datasets suffer from test set leakage, due to inverse relations from the training set being present in the test set -- however, the extent of this issue has so far not been quantified. We find this problem to be severe: a simple rule-based model can achieve state-of-the-art results on both WN18 and FB15k. To ensure that models are evaluated on datasets where simply exploiting inverse relations cannot yield competitive results, we investigate and validate several commonly used datasets -- deriving robust variants where necessary. We then perform experiments on these robust datasets for our own and several previously proposed models and find that ConvE achieves state-of-the-art Mean Reciprocal Rank across most datasets.
Comparing Population Means Under Local Differential Privacy: With Significance and Power
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

A statistical hypothesis test determines whether a hypothesis should be rejected based on samples from populations. In particular, randomized controlled experiments (or A/B testing) that compare population means using, e.g., t-tests, have been widely deployed in technology companies to aid in making data-driven decisions. Samples used in these tests are collected from users and may contain sensitive information. Both the data collection and the testing process may compromise individuals' privacy. In this paper, we study how to conduct hypothesis tests to compare population means while preserving privacy. We use the notation of local differential privacy (LDP), which has recently emerged as the main tool to ensure each individual's privacy without the need of a trusted data collector. We propose LDP tests that inject noise into every user's data in the samples before collecting them (so users do not need to trust the data collector), and draw conclusions with bounded type-I (significance level) and type-II errors (1 - power). Our approaches can be extended to the scenario where some users require LDP while some are willing to provide exact data. We report experimental results on real-world datasets to verify the effectiveness of our approaches.