bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
AIVAT: A New Variance Reduction Technique for Agent Evaluation in Imperfect Information Games
Authors: Burch Neil , Schmid Martin , Moravcik Matej , Morill Dustin , Bowling Michael
Published: June 2022

Evaluating agent performance when outcomes are stochastic and agents use randomized strategies can be challenging when there is limited data available. The variance of sampled outcomes may make the simple approach of Monte Carlo sampling inadequate. This is the case for agents playing heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em poker, whereman-machine competitions typically involve multiple days of consistent play by multiple players, but still can (and sometimes did) result in statistically insignificant conclusions. In this paper, we introduce AIVAT, a low variance, provably unbiased value assessment tool that exploits an arbitrary heuristic estimate of state value, as well as the explicit strategy of a subset of the agents. Unlike existing techniques which reduce the variance from chance events, or only consider game ending actions, AIVAT reduces the variance both from choices by nature and by players with a known strategy. The resulting estimator produces results that significantly outperform previous state of the art techniques. It was able to reduce the standard deviation of a Texas hold'em poker man-machine match by 85\% and consequently requires 44 times fewer games to draw the same statistical conclusion. AIVAT enabled the first statistically significant AI victory against professional poker players in no-limit hold'em.Furthermore, the technique was powerful enough to produce statistically significant results versus individual players, not just an aggregate pool of the players. We also used AIVAT to analyze a short series of AI vs human poker tournaments,producing statistical significant results with as few as 28 matches.
Deep TAMER: Interactive Agent Shaping in High-Dimensional State Spaces
Authors: Warnell Garrett , Waytowich Nicholas , Lawhern Vernon , Stone Peter
Published: June 2022

While recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have allowed autonomous learning agents to succeed at a variety of complex tasks, existing algorithms generally require a lot oftraining data. One way to increase the speed at which agent sare able to learn to perform tasks is by leveraging the input of human trainers. Although such input can take many forms, real-time, scalar-valued feedback is especially useful in situations where it proves difficult or impossible for humans to provide expert demonstrations. Previous approaches have shown the usefulness of human input provided in this fashion (e.g., the TAMER framework), but they have thus far not considered high-dimensional state spaces or employed the use of deep learning. In this paper, we do both: we propose DeepTAMER, an extension of the TAMER framework that leverages the representational power of deep neural networks inorder to learn complex tasks in just a short amount of time with a human trainer. We demonstrate Deep TAMER’s success by using it and just 15 minutes of human-provided feedback to train an agent that performs better than humans on the Atari game of Bowling - a task that has proven difficult for even state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods.
How AI Wins Friends and Influences People in Repeated Games With Cheap Talk
Authors: Oudah Mayada , Rahwan Talal , Crandall Tawna , Crandall Jacob
Published: June 2022

Research has shown that a person's financial success is more dependent on the ability to deal with people than on professional knowledge. Sage advice, such as "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" and principles articulated in Carnegie's classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People," offer trusted rules-of-thumb for how people can successfully deal with each other. However, alternative philosophies for dealing with people have also emerged. The success of an AI system is likewise contingent on its ability to win friends and influence people. In this paper, we study how AI systems should be designed to win friends and influence people in repeated games with cheap talk (RGCTs). We create several algorithms for playing RGCTs by combining existing behavioral strategies (what the AI does) with signaling strategies (what the AI says) derived from several competing philosophies. Via user study, we evaluate these algorithms in four RGCTs. Our results suggest sufficient properties for AIs to win friends and influence people in RGCTs.
Anchors: High-Precision Model-Agnostic Explanations
Authors: Ribeiro Marco Tulio , Singh Sameer , Guestrin Carlos
Published: June 2022

We introduce a novel model-agnostic system that explains the behavior of complex models with high-precision rules called anchors, representing local, "sufficient" conditions for predictions. We propose an algorithm to efficiently compute these explanations for any black-box model with high-probability guarantees. We demonstrate the flexibility of anchors by explaining a myriad of different models for different domains and tasks. In a user study, we show that anchors enable users to predict how a model would behave on unseen instances with less effort and higher precision, as compared to existing linear explanations or no explanations.
Human-in-the-Loop SLAM
Authors: Nashed Samer , Biswas Joydeep
Published: June 2022

Building large-scale, globally consistent maps is a challenging problem, made more difficult in environments with limited access, sparse features, or when using data collected by novice users. For such scenarios, where state-of-the-art mapping algorithms produce globally inconsistent maps, we introduce a systematic approach to incorporating sparse human corrections, which we term Human-in-the-Loop Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (HitL-SLAM). Given an initial factor graph for pose graph SLAM, HitL-SLAM accepts approximate, potentially erroneous, and rank-deficient human input, infers the intended correction via expectation maximization (EM), back-propagates the extracted corrections over the pose graph, and finally jointly optimizes the factor graph including the human inputs as human correction factor terms, to yield globally consistent large-scale maps. We thus contribute an EM formulation for inferring potentially rank-deficient human corrections to mapping, and human correction factor extensions to the factor graphs for pose graph SLAM that result in a principled approach to joint optimization of the pose graph while simultaneously accounting for multiple forms of human correction. We present empirical results showing the effectiveness of HitL-SLAM at generating globally accurate and consistent maps even when given poor initial estimates of the map.
Information Gathering With Peers: Submodular Optimization With Peer-Prediction Constraints
Authors: Radanovic Goran , Singla Adish , Krause Andreas , Faltings Boi
Published: June 2022

We study a problem of optimal information gathering from multiple data providers that need to be incentivized to provide accurate information. This problem arises in many real world applications that rely on crowdsourced data sets, but where the process of obtaining data is costly. A notable example of such a scenario is crowd sensing. To this end, we formulate the problem of optimal information gathering as maximization of a submodular function under a budget constraint, where the budget represents the total expected payment to data providers. Contrary to the existing approaches, we base our payments on incentives for accuracy and truthfulness, in particular, peer prediction methods that score each of the selected data providers against its best peer, while ensuring that the minimum expected payment is above a given threshold. We first show that the problem at hand is hard to approximate within a constant factor that is not dependent on the properties of the payment function. However, for given topological and analytical properties of the instance, we construct two greedy algorithms, respectively called PPCGreedy and PPCGreedyIter, and establish theoretical bounds on their performance w.r.t. the optimal solution. Finally, we evaluate our methods using a realistic crowd sensing testbed.
Understanding Social Interpersonal Interaction via Synchronization Templates of Facial Events
Authors: Li Rui , Curhan Jared , Hoque Mohammed
Published: June 2022

Automatic facial expression analysis in inter-personal communication is challenging. Not only because conversation partners' facial expressions mutually influence each other, but also because no correct interpretation of facial expressions is possible without taking social context into account. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic framework to model interactional synchronization between conversation partners based on their facial expressions. Interactional synchronization manifests temporal dynamics of conversation partners' mutual influence. In particular, the model allows us to discover a set of common and unique facial synchronization templates directly from natural interpersonal interaction without recourse to any predefined labeling schemes. The facial synchronization templates represent periodical facial event coordinations shared by multiple conversation pairs in a specific social context. We test our model on two different dyadic conversations of negotiation and job-interview. Based on the discovered facial event coordination, we are able to predict their conversation outcomes with higher accuracy than HMMs and GMMs.
Proximal Alternating Direction Network: A Globally Converged Deep Unrolling Framework
Authors: Liu Risheng , Fan Xin , Cheng Shichao , Wang Xiangyu , Luo Zhongxuan
Published: June 2022

Deep learning models have gained great success in many real-world applications. However, most existing networks are typically designed in heuristic manners, thus lack of rigorous mathematical principles and derivations. Several recent studies build deep structures by unrolling a particular optimization model that involves task information. Unfortunately, due to the dynamic nature of network parameters, their resultant deep propagation networks do not possess the nice convergence property as the original optimization scheme does. This paper provides a novel proximal unrolling framework to establish deep models by integrating experimentally verified network architectures and rich cues of the tasks. More importantly,we prove in theory that 1) the propagation generated by our unrolled deep model globally converges to a critical-point of a given variational energy, and 2) the proposed framework is still able to learn priors from training data to generate a convergent propagation even when task information is only partially available. Indeed, these theoretical results are the best we can ask for, unless stronger assumptions are enforced. Extensive experiments on various real-world applications verify the theoretical convergence and demonstrate the effectiveness of designed deep models.
Incorporating GAN for Negative Sampling in Knowledge Representation Learning
Authors: Wang Peifeng , Li Shuangyin , Pan Rong
Published: June 2022

Knowledge representation learning aims at modeling knowledge graph by encoding entities and relations into a low dimensional space. Most of the traditional works for knowledge embedding need negative sampling to minimize a margin-based ranking loss. However, those works construct negative samples through a random mode, by which the samples are often too trivial to fit the model efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge representation learning framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). In this GAN-based framework, we take advantage of a generator to obtain high-quality negative samples. Meanwhile, the discriminator in GAN learns the embeddings of the entities and relations in knowledge graph. Thus, we can incorporate the proposed GAN-based framework into various traditional models to improve the ability of knowledge representation learning. Experimental results show that our proposed GAN-based framework outperforms baselines on triplets classification and link prediction tasks.
Stream Reasoning in Temporal Datalog
Authors: Ronca Alessandro , Kaminski Mark , Cuenca Grau Bernardo , Motik Boris , Horrocks Ian
Published: June 2022

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in extending traditional stream processing engines with logical, rule-based, reasoning capabilities. This poses significant theoretical and practical challenges since rules can derive new information and propagate it both towards past and future time points; as a result, streamed query answers can depend on data that has not yet been received, as well as on data that arrived far in the past. Stream reasoning algorithms, however, must be able to stream out query answers as soon as possible, and can only keep a limited number of previous input facts in memory. In this paper, we propose novel reasoning problems to deal with these challenges, and study their computational properties on Datalog extended with a temporal sort and the successor function (a core rule-based language for stream reasoning applications).
Answering Regular Path Queries over SQ Ontologies
Authors: Gutiérrez-Basulto Víctor , Ibáñez-García Yazmín , Jung Jean Christoph
Published: June 2022

We study query answering in the description logic SQ supporting qualified number restrictions on both transitive and non-transitive roles. Our main contributions are a tree-like model property for SQ-knowledge bases and, building upon this, an optimal automata-based algorithm for answering positive existential regular path queries in 2EXPTIME.
Externally Supported Models for Efficient Computation of Paracoherent Answer Sets
Authors: Amendola Giovanni , Dodaro Carmine , Faber Wolfgang , Ricca Francesco
Published: June 2022

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established formalism for nonmonotonic reasoning.While incoherence, the non-existence of answer sets for some programs, is an important feature of ASP, it has frequently been criticised and indeed has some disadvantages, especially for query answering.Paracoherent semantics have been suggested as a remedy, which extend the classical notion of answer sets to draw meaningful conclusions also from incoherent programs. In this paper we present an alternative characterization of the two major paracoherent semantics in terms of (extended) externally supported models. This definition uses a transformation of ASP programs that is more parsimonious than the classic epistemic transformation used in recent implementations.A performance comparison carried out on benchmarks from ASP competitions shows that the usage of the new transformation brings about performance improvements that are independent of the underlying algorithms.
Dependence in Propositional Logic: Formula-Formula Dependence and Formula Forgetting – Application to Belief Update and Conservative Extension
Authors: Fang Liangda , Wan Hai , Liu Xianqiao , Fang Biqing , Lai Zhaorong
Published: June 2022

Dependence is an important concept for many tasks in artificial intelligence. A task can be executed more efficiently by discarding something independent from the task. In this paper, we propose two novel notions of dependence in propositional logic: formula-formula dependence and formula forgetting. The first is a relation between formulas capturing whether a formula depends on another one, while the second is an operation that returns the strongest consequence independent of a formula. We also apply these two notions in two well-known issues: belief update and conservative extension. Firstly, we define a new update operator based on formula-formula dependence. Furthermore, we reduce conservative extension to formula forgetting.
On Consensus in Belief Merging
Authors: Schwind Nicolas , Marquis Pierre
Published: June 2022

We define a consensus postulate in the propositional belief merging setting. In a nutshell, this postulate imposes the merged base to be consistent with the pieces of information provided by each agent involved in the merging process. The interplay of this new postulate with the IC postulates for belief merging is studied, and an incompatibility result is proved. The maximal sets of IC postulates which are consistent with the consensus postulate are exhibited. When satisfying some of the remaining IC postulates, consensus operators are shown to suffer from a weak inferential power. We then introduce two families of consensus operators having a better inferential power by setting aside some of these postulates.
Forgetting and Unfolding for Existential Rules
Authors: Wang Zhe , Wang Kewen , Zhang Xiaowang
Published: June 2022

Existential rules, a family of expressive ontology languages, inherit desired expressive and reasoning properties from both description logics and logic programming. On the other hand, forgetting is a well studied operation for ontology reuse, obfuscation and analysis. Yet it is challenging to establish a theory of forgetting for existential rules. In this paper, we lay the foundation for a theory of forgetting for existential rules by developing a novel notion of unfolding. In particular, we introduce a definition of forgetting for existential rules in terms of query answering and provide a characterisation of forgetting by the unfolding. A result of forgetting may not be expressible in existential rules, and we then capture the expressibility of forgetting by a variant of boundedness. While the expressibility is undecidable in general, we identify a decidable fragment. Finally, we provide an algorithm for forgetting in this fragment.
LTLf/LDLf Non-Markovian Rewards
Authors: Brafman Ronen , De Giacomo Giuseppe , Patrizi Fabio
Published: June 2022

In Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), the reward obtained in a state is Markovian, i.e., depends on the last state and action. This dependency makes it difficult to reward more interesting long-term behaviors, such as always closing a door after it has been opened, or providing coffee only following a request. Extending MDPs to handle non-Markovian reward functions was the subject of two previous lines of work. Both use LTL variants to specify the reward function and then compile the new model back into a Markovian model. Building on recent progress in temporal logics over finite traces, we adopt LDLf for specifying non-Markovian rewards and provide an elegant automata construction for building a Markovian model, which extends that of previous work and offers strong minimality and compositionality guarantees.
Strategic Coalitions With Perfect Recall
Authors: Naumov Pavel , Tao Jia
Published: June 2022

The paper proposes a bimodal logic that describes an interplay between distributed knowledge modality and coalition know-how modality. Unlike other similar systems, the one proposed here assumes perfect recall by all agents. Perfect recall is captured in the system by a single axiom. The main technical results are the soundness and the completeness theorems for the proposed logical system.
Social Norms of Cooperation With Costly Reputation Building
Authors: Santos Fernando , Pacheco Jorge , Santos Francisco
Published: June 2022

Social norms regulate actions in artificial societies, steering collective behavior towards desirable states. In real societies, social norms can solve cooperation dilemmas, constituting a key ingredient in systems of indirect reciprocity: reputations of agents are assigned following social norms that identify their actions as good or bad. This, in turn, implies that agents can discriminate between the different actions of others and that the behaviors of each agent are known to the population at large. This is only possible if the agents report their interactions. Reporting constitutes, this way, a fundamental ingredient of indirect reciprocity, as in its absence cooperation in a multiagent system may collapse. Yet, in most studies to date, reporting is assumed to be cost-free, which collides with many life situations, where reporting can easily incur a cost (costly reputation building). Here we develop a new model of indirect reciprocity that allows reputation building to be costly. We show that only two norms can sustain cooperation under costly reputation building, a feature that requires agents to be able to anticipate the reporting intentions of their opponents, depending sensitively on both the cost of reporting and the accuracy level of reporting anticipation.
Reinforcement Learning in POMDPs With Memoryless Options and Option-Observation Initiation Sets
Authors: Steckelmacher Denis , Roijers Diederik , Harutyunyan Anna , Vrancx Peter , Plisnier Hélène , Nowé Ann
Published: June 2022

Many real-world reinforcement learning problems have a hierarchical nature, and often exhibit some degree of partial observability. While hierarchy and partial observability are usually tackled separately (for instance by combining recurrent neural networks and options), we show that addressing both problems simultaneously is simpler and more efficient in many cases. More specifically, we make the initiation set of options conditional on the previously-executed option, and show that options with such Option-Observation Initiation Sets (OOIs) are at least as expressive as Finite State Controllers (FSCs), a state-of-the-art approach for learning in POMDPs. OOIs are easy to design based on an intuitive description of the task, lead to explainable policies and keep the top-level and option policies memoryless. Our experiments show that OOIs allow agents to learn optimal policies in challenging POMDPs, while being much more sample-efficient than a recurrent neural network over options.
Randomized Clustered Nystrom for Large-Scale Kernel Machines
Authors: Pourkamali-Anaraki Farhad , Becker Stephen , Wakin Michael
Published: June 2022

The Nystrom method is a popular technique for generating low-rank approximations of kernel matrices that arise in many machine learning problems. The approximation quality of the Nystrom method depends crucially on the number of selected landmark points and the selection procedure. In this paper, we introduce a randomized algorithm for generating landmark points that is scalable to large high-dimensional data sets. The proposed method performs K-means clustering on low-dimensional random projections of a data set and thus leads to significant savings for high-dimensional data sets. Our theoretical results characterize the tradeoffs between accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. Moreover, numerical experiments on classification and regression tasks demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our proposed method compared with existing approaches.
Proper Loss Functions for Nonlinear Hawkes Processes
Authors: Menon Aditya , Lee Young
Published: June 2022

Temporal point processes are a statistical framework for modelling the times at which events of interest occur. The Hawkes process is a well-studied instance of this framework that captures self-exciting behaviour, wherein the occurrence of one event increases the likelihood of future events. Such processes have been successfully applied to model phenomena ranging from earthquakes to behaviour in a social network. We propose a framework to design new loss functions to train linear and nonlinear Hawkes processes. This captures standard maximum likelihood as a special case, but allows for other losses that guarantee convex objective functions (for certain types of kernel), and admit simpler optimisation. We illustrate these points with three concrete examples: for linear Hawkes processes, we provide a least-squares style loss potentially admitting closed-form optimisation; for exponential Hawkes processes, we reduce training to a weighted logistic regression; and for sigmoidal Hawkes processes, we propose an asymmetric form of logistic regression.
Consistent and Specific Multi-View Subspace Clustering
Authors: Luo Shirui , Zhang Changqing , Zhang Wei , Cao Xiaochun
Published: June 2022

Multi-view clustering has attracted intensive attention due to the effectiveness of exploiting multiple views of data. However, most existing multi-view clustering methods only aim to explore the consistency or enhance the diversity of different views. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view subspace clustering method (CSMSC), where consistency and specificity are jointly exploited for subspace representation learning. We formulate the multi-view self-representation property using a shared consistent representation and a set of specific representations, which better fits the real-world datasets. Specifically, consistency models the common properties among all views, while specificity captures the inherent difference in each view. In addition, to optimize the non-convex problem, we introduce a convex relaxation and develop an alternating optimization algorithm to recover the corresponding data representations. Experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves better performance over several state-of-the-arts.
Nonlinear Pairwise Layer and Its Training for Kernel Learning
Authors: Liu Fanghui , Huang Xiaolin , Gong Chen , Yang Jie , Li Li
Published: June 2022

Kernel learning is a fundamental technique that has been intensively studied in the past decades. For the complicated practical tasks, the traditional "shallow" kernels (e.g., Gaussian kernel and sigmoid kernel) are not flexible enough to produce satisfactory performance. To address this shortcoming, this paper introduces a nonlinear layer in kernel learning to enhance the model flexibility. This layer is pairwise, which fully considers the coupling information among examples. So our model contains a fixed single mapping layer (i.e. a Gaussian kernel) as well as a nonlinear pairwise layer, thereby achieving better flexibility than the existing kernel structures. Moreover, the proposed structure can be seamlessly embedded to Support Vector Machines (SVM), of which the training process can be formulated as a joint optimization problem including nonlinear function learning and standard SVM optimization. We theoretically prove that the objective function is gradient-Lipschitz continuous, which further guides us how to accelerate the optimization process in a deep kernel architecture. Experimentally, we find that the proposed structure outperforms other state-ofthe-art kernel-based algorithms on various benchmark datasets, and thus the effectiveness of the incorporated pairwise layer with its training approach is demonstrated.
Unsupervised Personalized Feature Selection
Authors: Li Jundong , Wu Liang , Dani Harsh , Liu Huan
Published: June 2022

Feature selection is effective in preparing high-dimensional data for a variety of learning tasks such as classification, clustering and anomaly detection. A vast majority of existing feature selection methods assume that all instances share some common patterns manifested in a subset of shared features. However, this assumption is not necessarily true in many domains where data instances could show high individuality. For example, in the medical domain, we need to capture the heterogeneous nature of patients for personalized predictive modeling, which could be characterized by a subset of instance-specific features. Motivated by this, we propose to study a novel problem of personalized feature selection. In particular, we investigate the problem in an unsupervised scenario as label information is usually hard to obtain in practice. To be specific, we present a novel unsupervised personalized feature selection framework UPFS to find some shared features by all instances and instance-specific features tailored to each instance. We formulate the problem into a principled optimization framework and provide an effective algorithm to solve it. Experimental results on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed UPFS framework.
Dynamic Deep Neural Networks: Optimizing Accuracy-Efficiency Trade-Offs by Selective Execution
Authors: Liu Lanlan , Deng Jia
Published: June 2022

We introduce Dynamic Deep Neural Networks (D2NN), a new type of feed-forward deep neural network that allows selective execution. Given an input, only a subset of D2NN neurons are executed, and the particular subset is determined by the D2NN itself. By pruning unnecessary computation depending on input, D2NNs provide a way to improve computational efficiency. To achieve dynamic selective execution, a D2NN augments a feed-forward deep neural network (directed acyclic graph of differentiable modules) with controller modules. Each controller module is a sub-network whose output is a decision that controls whether other modules can execute. A D2NN is trained end to end. Both regular and controller modules in a D2NN are learnable and are jointly trained to optimize both accuracy and efficiency. Such training is achieved by integrating backpropagation with reinforcement learning. With extensive experiments of various D2NN architectures on image classification tasks, we demonstrate that D2NNs are general and flexible, and can effectively optimize accuracy-efficiency trade-offs.
A General Formulation for Safely Exploiting Weakly Supervised Data
Authors: Guo Lan-Zhe , Li Yu-Feng
Published: June 2022

Weakly supervised data helps improve learning performance, which is an important machine learning data. However, recent results indicate that machine learning techniques with the usage of weakly supervised data may sometimes lead to performance degradation. How to safely leverage weakly supervised data has become an important issue, whereas there is only very limited effort, especially on a general formulation to help provide insight to understand safe weakly supervised learning. In this paper we present a scheme, which builds the final prediction results by integrating several weakly supervised learners. Our resultant formulation brings two implications. i) It has safeness guarantees for the commonly used convex loss functions in both regression and classification tasks of weakly supervised learning; ii) It can embed uncertain prior knowledge about the importance of base learners flexibly. Moreover, our formulation can be addressed globally by simple convex quadratic program or linear program in an efficient manner. Experiments on multiple weakly supervised learning tasks such as label noise learning, domain adaptation and semi-supervised learning validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.
On the ERM Principle With Networked Data
Authors: Wang Yuanhong , Wang Yuyi , Liu Xingwu , Pu Juhua
Published: June 2022

Networked data, in which every training example involves two objects and may share some common objects with others, is used in many machine learning tasks such as learning to rank and link prediction. A challenge of learning from networked examples is that target values are not known for some pairs of objects. In this case, neither the classical i.i.d. assumption nor techniques based on complete U-statistics can be used. Most existing theoretical results of this problem only deal with the classical empirical risk minimization (ERM) principle that always weights every example equally, but this strategy leads to unsatisfactory bounds. We consider general weighted ERM and show new universal risk bounds for this problem. These new bounds naturally define an optimization problem which leads to appropriate weights for networked examples. Though this optimization problem is not convex in general, we devise a new fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) to solve it.
On Value Function Representation of Long Horizon Problems
Authors: Lehnert Lucas , Laroche Romain , Van Seijen Harm
Published: June 2022

In Reinforcement Learning, an intelligent agent has to make a sequence of decisions to accomplish a goal. If this sequence is long, then the agent has to plan over a long horizon. While learning the optimal policy and its value function is a well studied problem in Reinforcement Learning, this paper focuses on the structure of the optimal value function and how hard it is to represent the optimal value function. We show that the generalized Rademacher complexity of the hypothesis space of all optimal value functions is dependent on the planning horizon and independent of the state and action space size. Further, we present bounds on the action-gaps of action value functions and show that they can collapse if a long planning horizon is used. The theoretical results are verified empirically on randomly generated MDPs and on a grid-world fruit collection task using deep value function approximation. Our theoretical results highlight a connection between value function approximation and the Options framework and suggest that value functions should be decomposed along bottlenecks of the MDP's transition dynamics.
Orthant-Wise Passive Descent Algorithms for Training L1-Regularized Models
Authors: Wangni Jianqiao
Published: June 2022

The L1-regularized models are widely used for sparse regression or classification tasks. In this paper, we propose the orthant-wise passive descent algorithm (OPDA) for solving L1-regularized models, as an improved substitute of proximal algorithms, which are the standard tools for optimizing the models nowadays. OPDA uses a stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) to initialize the descent direction, then apply a novel alignment operator to encourage each element keeping the same sign after one iteration of update, so the parameter remains in the same orthant as before. It also explicitly suppresses the magnitude of each element to impose sparsity. The quasi-Newton update can be utilized to incorporate curvature information and accelerate the speed. We prove a linear convergence rate for OPDA on general smooth and strongly-convex loss functions. By conducting experiments on L1-regularized logistic regression and convolutional neural networks, we show that OPDA outperforms state-of-the-art stochastic proximal algorithms, implying a wide range of applications in training sparse models.
Link Prediction via Subgraph Embedding-Based Convex Matrix Completion
Authors: Cao Zhu , Wang Linlin , De Melo Gerard
Published: June 2022

Link prediction is of fundamental importance in network science and machine learning. Early methods consider only simple topological features, while subsequent supervised approaches typically rely on human-labeled data and feature engineering. In this work, we present a new representation learning-based approach called SEMAC that jointly exploits fine-grained node features as well as the overall graph topology. In contrast to the SGNS or SVD methods espoused in previous representation-based studies, our model represents nodes in terms of subgraph embeddings acquired via a form of convex matrix completion to iteratively reduce the rank, and thereby, more effectively eliminate noise in the representation. Thus, subgraph embeddings and convex matrix completion are elegantly integrated into a novel link prediction framework. Experimental results on several datasets show the effectiveness of our method compared to previous work.
Word Co-Occurrence Regularized Non-Negative Matrix Tri-Factorization for Text Data Co-Clustering
Authors: Salah Aghiles , Ailem Melissa , Nadif Mohamed
Published: June 2022

Text data co-clustering is the process of partitioning the documents and words simultaneously. This approach has proven to be more useful than traditional one-sided clustering when dealing with sparsity. Among the wide range of co-clustering approaches, Non-Negative Matrix Tri-Factorization (NMTF) is recognized for its high performance, flexibility and theoretical foundations. One important aspect when dealing with text data, is to capture the semantic relationships between words since documents that are about the same topic may not necessarily use exactly the same vocabulary. However, this aspect has been overlooked by previous co-clustering models, including NMTF. To address this issue, we rely on the distributional hypothesis stating that words which co-occur frequently within the same context, e.g., a document or sentence, are likely to have similar meanings. We then propose a new NMTF model that maps frequently co-occurring words roughly to the same direction in the latent space to reflect the relationships between them. To infer the factor matrices, we derive a scalable alternating optimization algorithm, whose convergence is guaranteed. Extensive experiments, on several real-world datasets, provide strong evidence for the effectiveness of the proposed approach, in terms of co-clustering.
From Hashing to CNNs: Training Binary Weight Networks via Hashing
Authors: Hu Qinghao , Wang Peisong , Cheng Jian
Published: June 2022

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown appealing performance on various computer vision tasks in recent years. This motivates people to deploy CNNs to real-world applications. However, most of state-of-art CNNs require large memory and computational resources, which hinders the deployment on mobile devices. Recent studies show that low-bit weight representation can reduce much storage and memory demand, and also can achieve efficient network inference. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel approach named BWNH to train Binary Weight Networks via Hashing. In this paper, we first reveal the strong connection between inner-product preserving hashing and binary weight networks, and show that training binary weight networks can be intrinsically regarded as a hashing problem. Based on this perspective, we propose an alternating optimization method to learn the hash codes instead of directly learning binary weights. Extensive experiments on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet demonstrate that our proposed BWNH outperforms current state-of-art by a large margin.
Efficient Test-Time Predictor Learning With Group-Based Budget
Authors: Wang Li , Zhu Dajiang , Chi Yujie
Published: June 2022

Learning a test-time efficient predictor is becoming important for many real-world applications for which accessing the necessary features of a test data is costly. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learn a linear predictor by introducing binary indicator variables for selecting feature groups and imposing an explicit budget constraint to up-bound the total cost of selected groups. We solve the convex relaxation of the resulting problem, with the optimal solution proved to be integers for most of the elements at the optima and independent of the specific forms of loss functions used. We propose a general and efficient algorithm to solve the relaxation problem by leveraging the existing SVM solvers with various loss functions. For certain loss functions, the proposed algorithm can further take the advantage of SVM solver in the primal to tackle large-scale and high-dimensional data. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method by comparing with various baselines.
Alternating Circulant Random Features for Semigroup Kernels
Authors: Mukuta Yusuke , Ushiku Yoshitaka , Harada Tatsuya
Published: June 2022

The random features method is an efficient method to approximate the kernel function. In this paper, we propose novel random features called "alternating circulant random features,'' which consist of a random mixture of independent random structured matrices. Existing fast random features exploit random sign flipping to reduce the correlation between features. Sign flipping works well on random Fourier features for real-valued shift-invariant kernels because the corresponding weight distribution is symmetric. However, this method cannot be applied to random Laplace features directly because the distribution is not symmetric. The method proposed herein yields alternating circulant random features, with the correlation between features being reduced through the random sampling of weights from multiple independent random structured matrices instead of via random sign flipping. The proposed method facilitates rapid calculation by employing structured matrices. In addition, the weight distribution is preserved because sign flipping is not implemented. The performance of the proposed alternating circulant random features method is theoretically and empirically evaluated.
Approximate Vanishing Ideal via Data Knotting
Authors: Kera Hiroshi , Hasegawa Yoshihiko
Published: June 2022

The vanishing ideal is a set of polynomials that takes zero value on the given data points. Originally proposed in computer algebra, the vanishing ideal has been recently exploited for extracting the nonlinear structures of data in many applications. To avoid overfitting to noisy data, the polynomials are often designed to approximately rather than exactly equal zero on the designated data. Although such approximations empirically demonstrate high performance, the sound algebraic structure of the vanishing ideal is lost. The present paper proposes a vanishing ideal that is tolerant to noisy data and also pursued to have a better algebraic structure. As a new problem, we simultaneously find a set of polynomials and data points for which the polynomials approximately vanish on the input data points, and almost exactly vanish on the discovered data points. In experimental classification tests, our method discovered much fewer and lower-degree polynomials than an existing state-of-the-art method. Consequently, our method accelerated the runtime of the classification tasks without degrading the classification accuracy.
Coupled Poisson Factorization Integrated With User/Item Metadata for Modeling Popular and Sparse Ratings in Scalable Recommendation
Authors: Do Trong Dinh Thac , Cao Longbing
Published: June 2022

Modelling sparse and large data sets is highly in demand yet challenging in recommender systems. With the computation only on the non-zero ratings, Poisson Factorization (PF) enabled by variational inference has shown its high efficiency in scalable recommendation, e.g., modeling millions of ratings. However, as PF learns the ratings by individual users on items with the Gamma distribution, it cannot capture the coupling relations between users (items) and the rating popularity (i.e., favorable rating scores that are given to one item) and rating sparsity (i.e., those users (items) with many zero ratings) for one item (user). This work proposes Coupled Poisson Factorization (CPF) to learn the couplings between users (items), and the user/item attributes (i.e., metadata) are integrated into CPF to form the Metadata-integrated CPF (mCPF) to not only handle sparse but also popular ratings in very large-scale data. Our empirical results show that the proposed models significantly outperform PF and address the key limitations in PF for scalable recommendation.
Sparse Modeling-Based Sequential Ensemble Learning for Effective Outlier Detection in High-Dimensional Numeric Data
Authors: Pang Guansong , Cao Longbing , Chen Ling , Lian Defu , Liu Huan
Published: June 2022

The large proportion of irrelevant or noisy features in real-life high-dimensional data presents a significant challenge to subspace/feature selection-based high-dimensional outlier detection (a.k.a. outlier scoring) methods. These methods often perform the two dependent tasks: relevant feature subset search and outlier scoring independently, consequently retaining features/subspaces irrelevant to the scoring method and downgrading the detection performance. This paper introduces a novel sequential ensemble-based framework SEMSE and its instance CINFO to address this issue. SEMSE learns the sequential ensembles to mutually refine feature selection and outlier scoring by iterative sparse modeling with outlier scores as the pseudo target feature. CINFO instantiates SEMSE by using three successive recurrent components to build such sequential ensembles. Given outlier scores output by an existing outlier scoring method on a feature subset, CINFO first defines a Cantelli's inequality-based outlier thresholding function to select outlier candidates with a false positive upper bound. It then performs lasso-based sparse regression by treating the outlier scores as the target feature and the original features as predictors on the outlier candidate set to obtain a feature subset that is tailored for the outlier scoring method. Our experiments show that two different outlier scoring methods enabled by CINFO (i) perform significantly better on 11 real-life high-dimensional data sets, and (ii) have much better resilience to noisy features, compared to their bare versions and three state-of-the-art competitors. The source code of CINFO is available at https://sites.google.com/site/gspangsite/sourcecode.
Fourier Feature Approximations for Periodic Kernels in Time-Series Modelling
Authors: Tompkins Anthony , Ramos Fabio
Published: June 2022

Gaussian Processes (GPs) provide an extremely powerful mechanism to model a variety of problems but incur an O(N3) complexity in the number of data samples. Common approximation methods rely on what are often termed inducing points but still typically incur an O(NM2) complexity in the data and corresponding inducing points. Using Random Fourier Feature (RFF) maps, we overcome this by transforming the problem into a Bayesian Linear Regression formulation upon which we apply a Bayesian Variational treatment that also allows learning the corresponding kernel hyperparameters, likelihood and noise parameters. In this paper we introduce an alternative method using Fourier series to obtain spectral representations of common kernels, in particular for periodic warpings, which surprisingly have a convergent, non-random form using special functions, requiring fewer spectral features to approximate their corresponding kernel to high accuracy. Using this, we can fuse the Random Fourier Feature spectral representations of common kernels with their periodic counterparts to show how they can more effectively and expressively learn patterns in time-series for both interpolation and extrapolation. This method combines robustness, scalability and equally importantly, interpretability through a symbolic declarative grammar that is both functionally and humanly intuitive — a property that is crucial for explainable decision making. Using probabilistic programming and Variational Inference we are able to efficiently optimise over these rich functional representations. We show significantly improved Gram matrix approximation errors, and also demonstrate the method in several time-series problems comparing other commonly used approaches such as recurrent neural networks.
Active Lifelong Learning With "Watchdog"
Authors: Sun Gan , Cong Yang , Xu Xiaowei
Published: June 2022

Lifelong learning intends to learn new consecutive tasks depending on previously accumulated experiences, i.e., knowledge library. However, the knowledge among different new coming tasks are imbalance. Therefore, in this paper, we try to mimic an effective "human cognition" strategy by actively sorting the importance of new tasks in the process of unknown-to-known and selecting to learn the important tasks with more information preferentially. To achieve this, we consider to assess the importance of the new coming task, i.e., unknown or not, as an outlier detection issue, and design a hierarchical dictionary learning model consisting of two-level task descriptors to sparse reconstruct each task with the l0 norm constraint. The new coming tasks are sorted depending on the sparse reconstruction score in descending order, and the task with high reconstruction score will be permitted to pass, where this mechanism is called as "watchdog." Next, the knowledge library of the lifelong learning framework encode the selected task by transferring previous knowledge, and then can also update itself with knowledge from both previously learned task and current task automatically. For model optimization, the alternating direction method is employed to solve our model and converges to a fixed point. Extensive experiments on both benchmark datasets and our own dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model especially in task selection and dictionary learning.