In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
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Question: Robust belief revision methods are crucial in streaming data situations for updating existing knowledge (or beliefs) with new incoming evidence. Bayes conditioning is the primary mechanism in use for belief revision in data fusion systems that use probabilistic inference. However, traditional conditioning methods face several challenges due to inherent data/source imperfections in big-data environments that harness soft (i.e., human or human-based) sources in addition to hard (i.e., physicsbased) sensors. The objective of this paper is to investigate the most natural extension of Bayes conditioning that is suitable for evidence updating in the presence of such uncertainties. By viewing the evidence updating process as a thought experiment, an elegant strategy is derived for robust evidence updating in the presence of extreme uncertainties that are characteristic of big-data environments. In particular, utilizing the Fagin-Halpern conditional notions, a natural extension to Bayes conditioning is derived for evidence that takes the form of a general belief function. The presented work differs fundamentally from the Conditional Update Equation (CUE) and authors own extensions of it. An overview of this development is provided via illustrative examples. Furthermore, insights into parameter selection under various fusion contexts are also provided.

Answer: Evidence Updating for Stream-Processing in Big-Data: Robust Conditioning in Soft and Hard Data Fusion Environments


Question: We consider the design of online learning algorithms in a general learning setting, with the goal of obtaining computationally efficient no-regret algorithms, when given access to an oracle for the offline optimization version of the problem. We present an algorithm that we call Generalized Follow-thePerturbed-Leader (Generalized FTPL) and provide conditions under which it achieves vanishing regret and is efficiently implementable with an oracle. Our second main contribution is the introduction of a new online adversarial auction-design framework for revenue maximization and an application of our oracle-efficient learning results to the adaptive optimization of auctions. Our learning algorithm is a generalization of the classic FTPL algorithm of Kalai and Vempala [27], playing at every iteration the historically best-performing action after adding some perturbation to the performance of each of its actions. The crux of our design is adding perturbations in a manner that leads to oracle-efficiency. We reduce this to designing a translation matrix, which translates a low dimensional vector with independent noise components into a high dimensional vector of perturbations on the learner’s action space. Our approach generalizes prior work on oracle-efficient online learning [11, 22, 27, 35], ranging from online combinatorial optimization, learning in simultaneous auctions, and contextual learning. Our auction-design framework considers an auctioneer learning an optimal auction rule in an online manner, every day observing an adversarially chosen vector of valuations. The auctioneer’s goal is to achieve revenue that competes with the revenue of the optimal auction in hindsight among those in some target class. We give oracle-efficient learning results for: (1) VCG auctions with bidder-specific reserves in single-parameter settings with matroid constraints, (2) envy-free item pricing in multi-item auctions with unlimited supply, and (3) s-level auctions of Morgenstern and Roughgarden [28] for singleitem settings. The last result implies good regret against the optimal overall auction when valuations are coming from a fast mixing Markov chain, that is independent across bidders. We also extend our results to the case when the learner observes side information on the bidders before running the auction (contextual learning). We present additional extensions to contextual learning and learning with approximate oracles, implemented by FPTAS or Maximal-in-Range algorithms. We provide further applications in online welfare maximization in multi-unit auctions and in no-regret learning in simultaneous item auctions, answering an open question from prior work. ∗Microsoft Research, New York, mdudik@microsoft.com †Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, nhaghtal@cs.cmu.edu ‡Microsoft Research, New York, haipeng@microsoft.com §Microsoft Research, New York, schapire@microsoft.com ¶Microsoft Research, New England, vasy@microsoft.com ‖Microsoft Research, New York, jenn@microsoft.com ar X iv :1 61 1. 01 68 8v 1 [ cs .L G ] 5 N ov 2 01 6

Answer: Oracle-Efficient Learning and Auction Design


Question: We envision a machine learning service provider facing a continuous stream of problems with the same input domain, but with output domains that may differ. Clients present the provider with problems implicitly, by labeling a few example inputs, and then ask the provider to train models which reasonably extend their labelings to novel inputs. The provider wants to avoid constraining its users to a set of common labels, so it does not assume any particular correspondence between labels for a new task and labels for previously encountered tasks. To perform well in this setting, the provider needs a representation of the input domain which, in expectation, permits effective models for new problems to be learned efficiently from a small number of examples. While this bears a resemblance to settings considered in previous work on multitask and lifelong learning, our non-assumption of inter-task label correspondence leads to a novel algorithm: Lifelong Learner of Discriminative Representations (LLDR), which explicitly minimizes a proxy for the intra-task small-sample generalization error. We examine the relative benefits of our approach on a diverse set of real-world datasets in three significant scenarios: representation learning, multitask learning and lifelong learning.

Answer:
Lifelong Learning of Discriminative Representations