bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Balancing Individual Preferences and Shared Objectives in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Durugkar Ishan , Liebman Elad , Stone Peter
Published: July 2020

In multiagent reinforcement learning scenarios, it is often the case that independent agents must jointly learn to perform a cooperative task. This paper focuses on such a scenario in which agents have individual preferences regarding how to accomplish the shared task. We consider a framework for this setting which balances individual preferences against task rewards using a linear mixing scheme. In our theoretical analysis we establish that agents can reach an equilibrium that leads to optimal shared task reward even when they consider individual preferences which aren't fully aligned with this task. We then empirically show, somewhat counter-intuitively, that there exist mixing schemes that outperform a purely task-oriented baseline. We further consider empirically how to optimize the mixing scheme.
Joint Partial Optimal Transport for Open Set Domain Adaptation
Authors: Xu Renjun , Liu Pelen , Zhang Yin , Cai Fang , Wang Jindong , Liang Shuoying , Ying Heting , Yin Jianwei
Published: July 2020

Domain adaptation (DA) has achieved a resounding success to learn a good classifier by leveraging labeled data from a source domain to adapt to an unlabeled target domain. However, in a general setting when the target domain contains classes that are never observed in the source domain, namely in Open Set Domain Adaptation (OSDA), existing DA methods failed to work because of the interference of the extra unknown classes. This is a much more challenging problem, since it can easily result in negative transfer due to the mismatch between the unknown and known classes. Existing researches are susceptible to misclassification when target domain unknown samples in the feature space distributed near the decision boundary learned from the labeled source domain. To overcome this, we propose Joint Partial Optimal Transport (JPOT), fully utilizing information of not only the labeled source domain but also the discriminative representation of unknown class in the target domain. The proposed joint discriminative prototypical compactness loss can not only achieve intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, but also estimate the mean and variance of the unknown class through backpropagation, which remains intractable for previous methods due to the blindness about the structure of the unknown classes. To our best knowledge, this is the first optimal transport model for OSDA. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model can significantly boost the performance of open set domain adaptation on standard DA datasets.
A Penny for Your Thoughts: The Value of Communication in Ad Hoc Teamwork
Authors: Mirsky Reuth , Macke William , Wang Andy , Yedidsion Harel , Stone Peter
Published: July 2020

In ad hoc teamwork, multiple agents need to collaborate without having knowledge about their teammates or their plans a priori. A common assumption in this research area is that the agents cannot communicate. However, just as two random people may speak the same language, autonomous teammates may also happen to share a communication protocol. This paper considers how such a shared protocol can be leveraged, introducing a means to reason about Communication in Ad Hoc Teamwork (CAT). The goal of this work is enabling improved ad hoc teamwork by judiciously leveraging the ability of the team to communicate.

We situate our study within a novel CAT scenario, involving tasks with multiple steps, where teammates' plans are unveiled over time. In this context, the paper proposes methods to reason about the timing and value of communication and introduces an algorithm for an ad hoc agent to leverage these methods. Finally, we introduces a new multiagent domain, the tool fetching domain, and we study how varying this domain's properties affects the usefulness of communication. Empirical results show the benefits of explicit reasoning about communication content and timing in ad hoc teamwork.
Mixed-Variable Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Daxberger Erik , Makarova Anastasia , Turchetta Matteo , Krause Andreas
Published: July 2020

The optimization of expensive to evaluate, black-box, mixed-variable functions, i.e. functions that have continuous and discrete inputs, is a difficult and yet pervasive problem in science and engineering. In Bayesian optimization (BO), special cases of this problem that consider fully continuous or fully discrete domains have been widely studied. However, few methods exist for mixed-variable domains and none of them can handle discrete constraints that arise in many real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce MiVaBo, a novel BO algorithm for the efficient optimization of mixed-variable functions combining a linear surrogate model based on expressive feature representations with Thompson sampling. We propose an effective method to optimize its acquisition function, a challenging problem for mixed-variable domains, making MiVaBo the first BO method that can handle complex constraints over the discrete variables. Moreover, we provide the first convergence analysis of a mixed-variable BO algorithm. Finally, we show that MiVaBo is significantly more sample efficient than state-of-the-art mixed-variable BO algorithms on several hyperparameter tuning tasks, including the tuning of deep generative models.
I4R: Promoting Deep Reinforcement Learning by the Indicator for Expressive Representations
Authors: Luo Xufang , Meng Qi , He Di , Chen Wei , Wang Yunhong
Published: July 2020

Learning expressive representations is always crucial for well-performed policies in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Different from supervised learning, in DRL, accurate targets are not always available, and some inputs with different actions only have tiny differences, which stimulates the demand for learning expressive representations. In this paper, firstly, we empirically compare the representations of DRL models with different performances. We observe that the representations of a better state extractor (SE) are more scattered than a worse one when they are visualized. Thus, we investigate the singular values of representation matrix, and find that, better SEs always correspond to smaller differences among these singular values. Next, based on such observations, we define an indicator of the representations for DRL model, which is the Number of Significant Singular Values (NSSV) of a representation matrix. Then, we propose I4R algorithm, to improve DRL algorithms by adding the corresponding regularization term to enhance the NSSV. Finally, we apply I4R to both policy gradient and value based algorithms on Atari games, and the results show the superiority of our proposed method.
Optimality, Accuracy, and Eﬀiciency of an Exact Functional Test
Authors: Nguyen Hien H. , Zhong Hua , Song Mingzhou
Published: July 2020

Functional dependency can lead to discoveries of new mechanisms not possible via symmetric association. Most asymmetric methods for causal direction inference are not driven by the function-versus-independence question. A recent exact functional test (EFT) was designed to detect functionally dependent patterns model-free with an exact null distribution. However, the EFT lacked a theoretical justification, had not been compared with other asymmetric methods, and was practically slow. Here, we prove the functional optimality of the EFT statistic, demonstrate its advantage in functional inference accuracy over five other methods, and develop a branch-and-bound algorithm with dynamic and quadratic programming to run at orders of magnitude faster than its previous implementation. Our results make it practical to answer the exact functional dependency question arising from discovery-driven artificial intelligence applications. Software that implements EFT is freely available in the R package 'FunChisq' (≥2.5.0) at https://cran.r-project.org/package=FunChisq
SVRG for Policy Evaluation with Fewer Gradient Evaluations
Authors: Peng Zilun , Touati Ahmed , Vincent Pascal , Precup Doina
Published: July 2020

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement learning in which one aims to estimate the value function of a given policy. SVRG makes use of gradient estimates at two scales. At the slower scale, SVRG computes a full gradient over the whole dataset, which could lead to prohibitive computation costs. In this work, we show that two variants of SVRG for policy evaluation could significantly diminish the number of gradient calculations while preserving a linear convergence speed. More importantly, our theoretical result implies that one does not need to use the entire dataset in every epoch of SVRG when it is applied to policy evaluation with linear function approximation. Our experiments demonstrate large computational savings provided by the proposed methods.
Diffusion Variational Autoencoders
Authors: Perez Rey Luis A. , Menkovski Vlado , Portegies Jim
Published: July 2020

A standard Variational Autoencoder, with a Euclidean latent space, is structurally incapable of capturing topological properties of certain datasets. To remove topological obstructions, we introduce Diffusion Variational Autoencoders (DeltaVAE) with arbitrary (closed) manifolds as a latent space. A Diffusion Variational Autoencoder uses transition kernels of Brownian motion on the manifold. In particular, it uses properties of the Brownian motion to implement the reparametrization trick and fast approximations to the KL divergence.

We show that the DeltaVAE is indeed capable of capturing topological properties for datasets with a known underlying latent structure derived from generative processes such as rotations and translations.
Inference-Masked Loss for Deep Structured Output Learning
Authors: Guo Quan , Rajaby Faghihi Hossein , Zhang Yue , Uszok Andrzej , Kordjamshidi Parisa
Published: July 2020

Structured learning algorithms usually involve an inference phase that selects the best global output variables assignments based on the local scores of all possible assignments.

We extend deep neural networks with structured learning to combine the power of learning representations and leveraging the use of domain knowledge in the form of output constraints during training.

Introducing a non-differentiable inference module to gradient-based training is a critical challenge.

Compared to using conventional loss functions that penalize every local error independently, we propose an inference-masked loss that takes into account the effect of inference and does not penalize the local errors that can be corrected by the inference.

We empirically show the inference-masked loss combined with the negative log-likelihood loss improves the performance on different tasks, namely entity relation recognition on CoNLL04 and ACE2005 corpora, and spatial role labeling on CLEF 2017 mSpRL dataset. We show the proposed approach helps to achieve better generalizability, particularly in the low-data regime.
Measuring the Discrepancy between Conditional Distributions: Methods, Properties and Applications
Authors: Yu Shujian , Shaker Ammar , Alesiani Francesco , Principe Jose
Published: July 2020

We propose a simple yet powerful test statistic to quantify the discrepancy between two conditional distributions. The new statistic avoids the explicit estimation of the underlying distributions in high-dimensional space and it operates on the cone of symmetric positive semideﬁnite (SPS) matrix using the Bregman matrix divergence. Moreover, it inherits the merits of the correntropy function to explicitly incorporate high-order statistics in the data. We present the properties of our new statistic and illustrate its connections to prior art. We ﬁnally show the applications of our new statistic on three different machine learning problems, namely the multi-task learning over graphs, the concept drift detection, and the information-theoretic feature selection, to demonstrate its utility and advantage. Code of our statistic is available at https://bit.ly/BregmanCorrentropy.
Is the Skip Connection Provable to Reform the Neural Network Loss Landscape?
Authors: Wang Lifu , Shen Bo , Zhao Ning , Zhang Zhiyuan
Published: July 2020

The residual network is now one of the most effective structures in deep learning, which utilizes the skip connections to “guarantee" the performance will not get worse. However, the non-convexity of the neural network makes it unclear whether the skip connections do provably improve the learning ability since the nonlinearity may create many local minima. In some previous works [Freeman and Bruna, 2016], it is shown that despite the non-convexity, the loss landscape of the two-layer ReLU network has good properties when the number m of hidden nodes is very large. In this paper, we follow this line to study the topology (sub-level sets) of the loss landscape of deep ReLU neural networks with a skip connection and theoretically prove that the skip connection network inherits the good properties of the two-layer network and skip connections can help to control the connectedness of the sub-level sets, such that any local minima worse than the global minima of some two-layer ReLU network will be very “shallow". The “depth" of these local minima are at most O(m^(η-1)/n), where n is the input dimension, η<1. This provides a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of the skip connection in deep learning.
Exploiting Neuron and Synapse Filter Dynamics in Spatial Temporal Learning of Deep Spiking Neural Network
Authors: Fang Haowen , Shrestha Amar , Zhao Ziyi , Qiu Qinru
Published: July 2020

The recently discovered spatial-temporal information processing capability of bio-inspired Spiking neural networks (SNN) has enabled some interesting models and applications. However designing large-scale and high-performance model is yet a challenge due to the lack of robust training algorithms. A bio-plausible SNN model with spatial-temporal property is a complex dynamic system. Synapses and neurons behave as filters capable of preserving temporal information. As such neuron dynamics and filter effects are ignored in existing training algorithms, the SNN downgrades into a memoryless system and loses the ability of temporal signal processing. Furthermore, spike timing plays an important role in information representation, but conventional rate-based spike coding models only consider spike trains statistically, and discard information carried by its temporal structures. To address the above issues, and exploit the temporal dynamics of SNNs, we formulate SNN as a network of infinite impulse response (IIR) filters with neuron nonlinearity. We proposed a training algorithm that is capable to learn spatial-temporal patterns by searching for the optimal synapse filter kernels and weights. The proposed model and training algorithm are applied to construct associative memories and classifiers for synthetic and public datasets including MNIST, NMNIST, DVS 128 etc. Their accuracy outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
BRPO: Batch Residual Policy Optimization
Authors: Sohn Sungryull , Chow Yinlam , Ooi Jayden , Nachum Ofir , Lee Honglak , Chi Ed , Boutilier Craig
Published: July 2020

In batch reinforcement learning (RL), one often constrains a learned policy to be close to the behavior (data-generating) policy, e.g., by constraining the learned action distribution to differ from the behavior policy by some maximum degree that

is the same at each state. This can cause batch RL to be overly conservative, unable to exploit large policy changes at frequently-visited, high-confidence states without risking poor performance at sparsely-visited states. To remedy this, we propose residual policies, where the allowable deviation of the learned policy is state-action-dependent. We derive a new for RL method, BRPO, which learns both the policy and allowable deviation that jointly maximize a lower bound on policy performance. We show that BRPO achieves the state-of-the-art performance in a number of tasks.
Communicative Representation Learning on Attributed Molecular Graphs
Authors: Song Ying , Zheng Shuangjia , Niu Zhangming , Fu Zhang-hua , Lu Yutong , Yang Yuedong
Published: July 2020

Constructing proper representations of molecules lies at the core of numerous tasks such as molecular property prediction and drug design. Graph neural networks, especially message passing neural network (MPNN) and its variants, have recently made remarkable achievements in molecular graph modeling. Albeit powerful, the one-sided focuses on atom (node) or bond (edge) information of existing MPNN methods lead to the insufficient representations of the attributed molecular graphs. Herein, we propose a Communicative Message Passing Neural Network (CMPNN) to improve the molecular embedding by strengthening the message interactions between nodes and edges through a communicative kernel. In addition, the message generation process is enriched by introducing a new message booster module. Extensive experiments demonstrated that the proposed model obtained superior performances against state-of-the-art baselines on six chemical property datasets. Further visualization also showed better representation capacity of our model.
Spectral Pruning: Compressing Deep Neural Networks via Spectral Analysis and its Generalization Error
Authors: Suzuki Taiji , Abe Hiroshi , Murata Tomoya , Horiuchi Shingo , Ito Kotaro , Wachi Tokuma , Hirai So , Yukishima Masatoshi , Nishimura Tomoaki
Published: July 2020

Compression techniques for deep neural network models are becoming very important

for the efficient execution of high-performance deep learning systems on edge-computing devices.

The concept of model compression is also important for analyzing the generalization error of deep learning, known as the compression-based error bound.

However, there is still huge gap between a practically effective compression method and its rigorous background of statistical learning theory. To resolve this issue, we develop a new theoretical framework for model compression

and propose a new pruning method called {\it spectral pruning} based on this framework.

We define the ``degrees of freedom'' to quantify the intrinsic dimensionality of a model

by using the eigenvalue distribution of the covariance matrix across the internal nodes

and show that the compression ability is essentially controlled by this quantity.

Moreover, we present a sharp generalization error bound of the compressed model

and characterize the bias--variance tradeoff induced by the compression procedure.

We apply our method to several datasets to justify our theoretical analyses and show the superiority of the the proposed method.
Constrained Policy Improvement for Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Sarafian Elad , Tamar Aviv , Kraus Sarit
Published: July 2020

We propose a policy improvement algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) termed Rerouted Behavior Improvement (RBI). RBI is designed to take into account the evaluation errors of the Q-function. Such errors are common in RL when learning the Q-value from finite experience data. Greedy policies or even constrained policy optimization algorithms that ignore these errors may suffer from an improvement penalty (i.e., a policy impairment). To reduce the penalty, the idea of RBI is to attenuate rapid policy changes to actions that were rarely sampled. This approach is shown to avoid catastrophic performance degradation and reduce regret when learning from a batch of transition samples. Through a two-armed bandit example, we show that it also increases data efficiency when the optimal action has a high variance. We evaluate RBI in two tasks in the Atari Learning Environment: (1) learning from observations of multiple behavior policies and (2) iterative RL. Our results demonstrate the advantage of RBI over greedy policies and other constrained policy optimization algorithms both in learning from observations and in RL tasks.
Crowdsourcing with Multiple-Source Knowledge Transfer
Authors: Han Guangyang , Tu Jinzheng , Yu Guoxian , Wang Jun , Domeniconi Carlotta
Published: July 2020

Crowdsourcing is a new computing paradigm that harnesses human effort to solve computer-hard problems. Budget and quality are two fundamental factors in crowdsourcing, but they are antagonistic and their balance is crucially important. Induction and inference are principled ways for humans to acquire knowledge. Transfer learning can also enable induction and inference processes. When a new task comes, we may not know how to go about approaching it. On the other hand, we may have easy access to relevant knowledge that can help us with the new task. As such, via appropriate knowledge transfer, for example, an improved annotation can be achieved for the task at a small cost. To make this idea concrete, we introduce the Crowdsourcing with Multiple-source Knowledge Transfer (CrowdMKT)approach to transfer knowledge from multiple, similar, but different domains for a new task, and to reduce the negative impact of irrelevant sources. CrwodMKT first learns a set of concentrated high-level feature vectors of tasks using knowledge transfer from multiple sources, and then introduces a probabilistic graphical model to jointly model the tasks with high-level features, workers, and their annotations. Finally, it adopts an EM algorithm to estimatethe workers strengths and consensus. Experimental results on real-world image and text datasets prove the effectiveness of CrowdMKT in improving quality and reducing the budget.
Asymmetric Distribution Measure for Few-shot Learning
Authors: Li Wenbin , Wang Lei , Huo Jing , Shi Yinghuan , Gao Yang , Luo Jiebo
Published: July 2020

The core idea of metric-based few-shot image classification is to directly measure the relations between query images and support classes to learn transferable feature embeddings. Previous work mainly focuses on image-level feature representations, which actually cannot effectively estimate a class's distribution due to the scarcity of samples. Some recent work shows that local descriptor based representations can achieve richer representations than image-level based representations. However, such works are still based on a less effective instance-level metric, especially a symmetric metric, to measure the relation between a query image and a support class. Given the natural asymmetric relation between a query image and a support class, we argue that an asymmetric measure is more suitable for metric-based few-shot learning. To that end, we propose a novel Asymmetric Distribution Measure (ADM) network for few-shot learning by calculating a joint local and global asymmetric measure between two multivariate local distributions of a query and a class. Moreover, a task-aware Contrastive Measure Strategy (CMS) is proposed to further enhance the measure function. On popular miniImageNet and tieredImageNet, ADM can achieve the state-of-the-art results, validating our innovative design of asymmetric distribution measures for few-shot learning. The source code can be downloaded from https://github.com/WenbinLee/ADM.git.
Multi-View Attribute Graph Convolution Networks for Clustering
Authors: Cheng Jiafeng , Wang Qianqian , Tao Zhiqiang , Xie Deyan , Gao Quanxue
Published: July 2020

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have made considerable achievements in processing graph-structured data. However, existing methods can not allocate learnable weights to different nodes in the neighborhood and lack of robustness on account of neglecting both node attributes and graph reconstruction. Moreover, most of multi-view GNNs mainly focus on the case of multiple graphs, while designing GNNs for solving graph-structured data of multi-view attributes is still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-View Attribute Graph Convolution Networks (MAGCN) model for the clustering task. MAGCN is designed with two-pathway encoders that map graph embedding features and learn the view-consistency information. Specifically, the first pathway develops multi-view attribute graph attention networks to reduce the noise/redundancy and learn the graph embedding features for each multi-view graph data. The second pathway develops consistent embedding encoders to capture the geometric relationship and probability distribution consistency among different views, which adaptively finds a consistent clustering embedding space for multi-view attributes. Experiments on three benchmark graph datasets show the superiority of our method compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms.
TransRHS: A Representation Learning Method for Knowledge Graphs with Relation Hierarchical Structure
Authors: Zhang Fuxiang , Wang Xin , Li Zhao , Li Jianxin
Published: July 2020

Representation learning of knowledge graphs aims to project both entities and relations as vectors in a continuous low-dimensional space. Relation Hierarchical Structure (RHS), which is constructed by a generalization relationship named subRelationOf between relations, can improve the overall performance of knowledge representation learning. However, most of the existing methods ignore this critical information, and a straightforward way of considering RHS may have a negative effect on the embeddings and thus reduce the model performance. In this paper, we propose a novel method named TransRHS, which is able to incorporate RHS seamlessly into the embeddings. More specifically, TransRHS encodes each relation as a vector together with a relation-specific sphere in the same space. Our TransRHS employs the relative positions among the vectors and spheres to model the subRelationOf, which embodies the inherent generalization relationships among relations. We evaluate our model on two typical tasks, i.e., link prediction and triple classification. The experimental results show that our TransRHS model significantly outperforms all baselines on both tasks, which verifies that the RHS information is significant to representation learning of knowledge graphs, and TransRHS can effectively and efficiently fuse RHS into knowledge graph embeddings.
Analysis of Q-learning with Adaptation and Momentum Restart for Gradient Descent
Authors: Weng Bowen , Xiong Huaqing , Liang Yingbin , Zhang Wei
Published: July 2020

Existing convergence analyses of Q-learning mostly focus on the vanilla stochastic gradient descent (SGD) type of updates. Despite the Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) has been commonly used for practical Q-learning algorithms, there has not been any convergence guarantee provided for Q-learning with such type of updates. In this paper, we first characterize the convergence rate for Q-AMSGrad, which is the Q-learning algorithm with AMSGrad update (a commonly adopted alternative of Adam for theoretical analysis). To further improve the performance, we propose to incorporate the momentum restart scheme to Q-AMSGrad, resulting in the so-called Q-AMSGradR algorithm. The convergence rate of Q-AMSGradR is also established. Our experiments on a linear quadratic regulator problem demonstrate that the two proposed Q-learning algorithms outperform the vanilla Q-learning with SGD updates. The two algorithms also exhibit significantly better performance than the DQN learning method over a batch of Atari 2600 games.
Gradient Perturbation is Underrated for Differentially Private Convex Optimization
Authors: Yu Da , Zhang Huishuai , Chen Wei , Yin Jian , Liu Tie-Yan
Published: July 2020

Gradient perturbation, widely used for differentially private optimization, injects noise at every iterative update to guarantee differential privacy. Previous work first determines the noise level that can satisfy the privacy requirement and then analyzes the utility of noisy gradient updates as in the non-private case. In contrast, we explore how the privacy noise affects the optimization property. We show that for differentially private convex optimization, the utility guarantee of differentially private (stochastic) gradient descent is determined by an expected curvature rather than the minimum curvature. The expected curvature, which represents the average curvature over the optimization path, is usually much larger than the minimum curvature. By using the expected curvature, we show that gradient perturbation can achieve a significantly improved utility guarantee that can theoretically justify the advantage of gradient perturbation over other perturbation methods. Finally, our extensive experiments suggest that gradient perturbation with the advanced composition method indeed outperforms other perturbation approaches by a large margin, matching our theoretical findings.
Exploring Parameter Space with Structured Noise for Meta-Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xu Hui , Zhang Chong , Wang Jiaxing , Ouyang Deqiang , Zheng Yu , Shao Jie
Published: July 2020

Efficient exploration is a major challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) and has been studied extensively. However, for a new task existing methods explore either by taking actions that maximize task agnostic objectives (such as information gain) or applying a simple dithering strategy (such as noise injection), which might not be effective enough. In this paper, we investigate whether previous learning experiences can be leveraged to guide exploration of current new task. To this end, we propose a novel Exploration with Structured Noise in Parameter Space (ESNPS) approach. ESNPS utilizes meta-learning and directly uses meta-policy parameters, which contain prior knowledge, as structured noises to perturb the base model for effective exploration in new tasks. Experimental results on four groups of tasks: cheetah velocity, cheetah direction, ant velocity and ant direction demonstrate the superiority of ESNPS against a number of competitive baselines.
Joint Multi-view 2D Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Object Classification
Authors: Xu Jinglin , Zhang Xiangsen , Li Wenbin , Liu Xinwang , Han Junwei
Published: July 2020

Three-dimensional (3D) object classification is widely involved in various computer vision applications, e.g., autonomous driving, simultaneous localization and mapping, which has attracted lots of attention in the committee. However, solving 3D object classification by directly employing the 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) generally suffers from high computational cost. Besides, existing view-based methods cannot better explore the content relationships between views. To this end, this work proposes a novel multi-view framework by jointly using multiple 2D-CNNs to capture discriminative information with relationships as well as a new multi-view loss fusion strategy, in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we utilize multiple 2D views of a 3D object as input and integrate the intra-view and inter-view information of each view through the view-specific 2D-CNN and a series of modules (outer product, view pair pooling, 1D convolution, and fully connected transformation). Furthermore, we design a novel view ensemble mechanism that selects several discriminative and informative views to jointly infer the category of a 3D object. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is able to outperform current state-of-the-art methods on 3D object classification. More importantly, this work provides a new way to improve 3D object classification from the perspective of fully utilizing well-established 2D-CNNs.
P-KDGAN: Progressive Knowledge Distillation with GANs for One-class Novelty Detection
Authors: Zhang Zhiwei , Chen Shifeng , Sun Lei
Published: July 2020

One-class novelty detection is to identify anomalous instances that do not conform to the expected normal instances. In this paper, the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) based on encoder-decoder-encoder pipeline are used for detection and achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, deep neural networks are too over-parameterized to deploy on resource-limited devices. Therefore, Progressive Knowledge Distillation with GANs (P-KDGAN) is proposed to learn compact and fast novelty detection networks. The P-KDGAN is a novel attempt to connect two standard GANs by the designed distillation loss for transferring knowledge from the teacher to the student. The progressive learning of knowledge distillation is a two-step approach that continuously improves the performance of the student GAN and achieves better performance than single step methods. In the first step, the student GAN learns the basic knowledge totally from the teacher via guiding of the pre-trained teacher GAN with fixed weights. In the second step, joint fine-training is adopted for the knowledgeable teacher and student GANs to further improve the performance and stability. The experimental results on CIFAR-10, MNIST, and FMNIST show that our method improves the performance of the student GAN by 2.44%, 1.77%, and 1.73% when compressing the computation at ratios of 24.45:1, 311.11:1, and 700:1, respectively.
EndCold: An End-to-End Framework for Cold Question Routing in Community Question Answering Services
Authors: Sun Jiankai , Zhao Jie , Sun Huan , Parthasarathy Srinivasan
Published: July 2020

Routing newly posted questions (a.k.a cold questions) to potential answerers with suitable expertise in Community Question Answering sites (CQAs) is an important and challenging task. The existing methods either focus only on embedding the graph structural information and are less effective for newly posted questions, or adopt manually engineered feature vectors that are not as representative as the graph embedding methods. Therefore, we propose to address the challenge of leveraging heterogeneous graph and textual information for cold question routing by designing an end-to-end framework that jointly learns CQA node embeddings and finds best answerers for cold questions. We conducted extensive experiments to confirm the usefulness of incorporating the textual information from question tags and demonstrate that an end-2-end framework can achieve promising performances on routing newly posted questions asked by both existing users and newly registered users.
Keeping Your Friends Close: Land Allocation with Friends
Authors: Elkind Edith , Patel Neel , Tsang Alan , Zick Yair
Published: July 2020

We examine the problem of assigning plots of land to prospective buyers who prefer living next to their friends. In this setting, each agent's utility depends on the plot she receives and the identities of the agents who receive the adjacent plots. We are interested in mechanisms without money that guarantee truthful reporting of both land values and friendships, as well as Pareto optimality and computational efficiency. We explore several modifications of the Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD) mechanism, and identify one that performs well according to these criteria, We also study the expected social welfare of the assignments produced by our mechanisms when agents' values for the land plots are binary; it turns out that we can achieve good approximations to the optimal social welfare, but only if the agents value the friendships highly.
pbSGD: Powered Stochastic Gradient Descent Methods for Accelerated Non-Convex Optimization
Authors: Zhou Beitong , Liu Jun , Sun Weigao , Chen Ruijuan , Tomlin Claire , Yuan Ye
Published: July 2020

We propose a novel technique for improving the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method to train deep networks, which we term pbSGD. The proposed pbSGD method simply raises the stochastic gradient to a certain power elementwise during iterations and introduces only one additional parameter, namely, the power exponent (when it equals to 1, pbSGD reduces to SGD). We further propose pbSGD with momentum, which we term pbSGDM. The main results of this paper present comprehensive experiments on popular deep learning models and benchmark datasets. Empirical results show that the proposed pbSGD and pbSGDM obtain faster initial training speed than adaptive gradient methods, comparable generalization ability with SGD, and improved robustness to hyper-parameter selection and vanishing gradients. pbSGD is essentially a gradient modifier via a nonlinear transformation. As such, it is orthogonal and complementary to other techniques for accelerating gradient-based optimization such as learning rate schedules. Finally, we show convergence rate analysis for both pbSGD and pbSGDM methods. The theoretical rates of convergence match the best known theoretical rates of convergence for SGD and SGDM methods on nonconvex functions.
Tight Convergence Rate of Gradient Descent for Eigenvalue Computation
Authors: Ding Qinghua , Zhou Kaiwen , Cheng James
Published: July 2020

Riemannian gradient descent (RGD) is a simple, popular and efficient algorithm for leading eigenvector computation [AMS08]. However, the existing analysis of RGD for eigenproblem is still not tight, which is O(log(n/epsilon)/Delta^2) due to [Xu et al., 2018]. In this paper, we show that RGD in fact converges at rate O(log(n/epsilon)/Delta), and give instances to shows the tightness of our result. This improves the best prior analysis by a quadratic factor. Besides, we also give tight convergence analysis of a deterministic variant of Oja's rule due to [Oja, 1982]. We show that it also enjoys fast convergence rate of O(log(n/epsilon)/Delta). Previous papers only gave asymptotic characterizations [Oja, 1982; Oja, 1989; Yi et al., 2005]. Our tools for proving convergence results include an innovative reduction and chaining technique, and a noisy fixed point iteration argument. Besides, we also give empirical justifications of our convergence rates over synthetic and real data.
A Label Attention Model for ICD Coding from Clinical Text
Authors: Vu Thanh , Nguyen Dat Quoc , Nguyen Anthony
Published: July 2020

ICD coding is a process of assigning the International Classification of Disease diagnosis codes to clinical/medical notes documented by health professionals (e.g. clinicians). This process requires significant human resources, and thus is costly and prone to error. To handle the problem, machine learning has been utilized for automatic ICD coding. Previous state-of-the-art models were based on convolutional neural networks, using a single/several fixed window sizes. However, the lengths and interdependence between text fragments related to ICD codes in clinical text vary significantly, leading to the difficulty of deciding what the best window sizes are. In this paper, we propose a new label attention model for automatic ICD coding, which can handle both the various lengths and the interdependence of the ICD code related text fragments. Furthermore, as the majority of ICD codes are not frequently used, leading to the extremely imbalanced data issue, we additionally propose a hierarchical joint learning mechanism extending our label attention model to handle the issue, using the hierarchical relationships among the codes. Our label attention model achieves new state-of-the-art results on three benchmark MIMIC datasets, and the joint learning mechanism helps improve the performances for infrequent codes.
HID: Hierarchical Multiscale Representation Learning for Information Diffusion
Authors: Zhou Honglu , Xu Shuyuan , Fu Zuohui , de Melo Gerard , Zhang Yongfeng , Kapadia Mubbasir
Published: July 2020

Multiscale modeling has yielded immense success on various machine learning tasks. However, it has not been properly explored for the prominent task of information diffusion, which aims to understand how information propagates along users in online social networks. For a specific user, whether and when to adopt a piece of information propagated from another user is affected by complex interactions, and thus, is very challenging to model. Current state-of-the-art techniques invoke deep neural models with vector representations of users. In this paper, we present a Hierarchical Information Diffusion (HID) framework by integrating user representation learning and multiscale modeling. The proposed framework can be layered on top of all information diffusion techniques that leverage user representations, so as to boost the predictive power and learning efficiency of the original technique. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets showcase the superiority of our method.
The Graph-based Mutual Attentive Network for Automatic Diagnosis
Authors: Yuan Quan , Chen Jun , Lu Chao , Huang Haifeng
Published: July 2020

The automatic diagnosis has been suffering from the problem of inadequate reliable corpus to train a trustworthy predictive model. Besides, most of the previous deep learning based diagnosis models adopt the sequence learning techniques (CNN or RNN), which is difficult to extract the complex structural information, e.g. graph structure, between the critical medical entities. In this paper, we propose to build the diagnosis model based on the high-standard EMR documents from real hospitals to improve the accuracy and the credibility of the resulting model. Meanwhile, we introduce the Graph Convolutional Network into the model that alleviates the sparse feature problem and facilitates the extraction of structural information for diagnosis. Moreover, we propose the mutual attentive network to enhance the representation of inputs towards the better model performance. The evaluation conducted on the real EMR documents demonstrates that the proposed model is more accurate compared to the previous sequence learning based diagnosis models. The proposed model has been integrated into the information systems in over hundreds of primary health care facilities in China to assist physicians in the diagnostic process.
Efficient Algorithms for Learning Revenue-Maximizing Two-Part Tariffs
Authors: Balcan Maria-Florina , Prasad Siddharth , Sandholm Tuomas
Published: July 2020

A two-part tariff is a pricing scheme that consists of an up-front lump sum fee and a per unit fee. Various products in the real world are sold via a menu, or list, of two-part tariffs---for example gym memberships, cell phone data plans, etc. We study learning high-revenue menus of two-part tariffs from buyer valuation data, in the setting where the mechanism designer has access to samples from the distribution over buyers' values rather than an explicit description thereof. Our algorithms have clear direct uses, and provide the missing piece for the recent generalization theory of two-part tariffs. We present a polynomial time algorithm for optimizing one two-part tariff. We also present an algorithm for optimizing a length-L menu of two-part tariffs with run time exponential in L but polynomial in all other problem parameters. We then generalize the problem to multiple markets. We prove how many samples suffice to guarantee that a two-part tariff scheme that is feasible on the samples is also feasible on a new problem instance with high probability. We then show that computing revenue-maximizing feasible prices is hard even for buyers with additive valuations. Then, for buyers with identical valuation distributions, we present a condition that is sufficient for the two-part tariff scheme from the unsegmented setting to be optimal for the market-segmented setting. Finally, we prove a generalization result that states how many samples suffice so that we can compute the unsegmented solution on the samples and still be guaranteed that we get a near-optimal solution for the market-segmented setting with high probability.
Optimal Policy for Deployment of Machine Learning Models on Energy-Bounded Systems
Authors: Mirzadeh Seyed Iman , Ghasemzadeh Hassan
Published: July 2020

With the recent advances in both machine learning and embedded systems research, the demand to deploy computational models for real-time execution on edge devices has increased substantially. Without deploying computational models on edge devices, the frequent transmission of sensor data to the cloud results in rapid battery draining due to the energy consumption of wireless data transmission. This rapid power dissipation leads to a considerable reduction in the battery lifetime of the system, therefore jeopardizing the real-world utility of smart devices. It is well-established that for difficult machine learning tasks, models with higher performance often require more computation power and thus are not power-efficient choices for deployment on edge devices. However, the trade-offs between performance and power consumption are not well studied. While numerous methods (e.g., model compression) have been developed to obtain an optimal model, these methods focus on improving the efficiency of a "single" model. In an entirely new direction, we introduce an effective method to find a combination of "multiple" models that are optimal in terms of power-efficiency and performance by solving an optimization problem in which both performance and power consumption are taken into account. Experimental results demonstrate that on the ImageNet dataset, we can achieve a 20% energy reduction with only 0.3% accuracy drop compared to Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks. Compared to a pruned convolutional neural network for human activity recognition, while consuming 1.7% less energy, our proposed policy achieves 1.3% higher accuracy.
Learning to Accelerate Heuristic Searching for Large-Scale Maximum Weighted b-Matching Problems in Online Advertising
Authors: Hao Xiaotian , Jin Junqi , Hao Jianye , Li Jin , Wang Weixun , Ma Yi , Zheng Zhenzhe , Li Han , Xu Jian , Gai Kun
Published: July 2020

Bipartite b-matching is fundamental in algorithm design, and has been widely applied into diverse applications, such as economic markets, labor markets, etc. These practical problems usually exhibit two distinct features: large-scale and dynamic, which requires the matching algorithm to be repeatedly executed at regular intervals. However, existing exact and approximate algorithms usually fail in such settings due to either requiring intolerable running time or too much computation resource.

To address this issue, based on a key observation that the matching instances vary not too much, we propose NeuSearcher which leverage the knowledge learned from previously instances to solve new problem instances. Specifically, we design a multichannel graph neural network to predict the threshold of the matched edges, by which the search region could be significantly reduced. We further propose a parallel heuristic search algorithm to iteratively improve the solution quality until convergence. Experiments on both open and industrial datasets demonstrate that NeuSearcher can speed up 2 to 3 times while achieving exactly the same matching solution compared with the state-of-the-art approximation approaches.
Learning Data-Driven Drug-Target-Disease Interaction via Neural Tensor Network
Authors: Chen Huiyuan , Li Jing
Published: July 2020

Precise medicine recommendations provide more effective treatments and cause fewer drug side effects. A key step is to understand the mechanistic relationships among drugs, targets, and diseases. Tensor-based models have the ability to explore relationships of drug-target-disease based on large amount of labeled data. However, existing tensor models fail to capture complex nonlinear dependencies among tensor data. In addition, rich medical knowledge are far less studied, which may lead to unsatisfied results. Here we propose a Neural Tensor Network (NeurTN) to assist personalized medicine treatments. NeurTN seamlessly combines tensor algebra and deep neural networks, which offers a more powerful way to capture the nonlinear relationships among drugs, targets, and diseases. To leverage medical knowledge, we augment NeurTN with geometric neural networks to capture the structural information of both drugs’ chemical structures and targets’ sequences. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the NeurTN model.