pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning World Graphs to Accelerate Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Wenling Shang, Alex Trott, Stephan Zheng, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In many real-world scenarios, an autonomous agent often encounters various tasks within a single complex environment. We propose to build a graph abstraction over the environment structure to accelerate the learning of these tasks. Here, nodes are important points of interest (pivotal states) and edges represent feasible traversals between them. Our approach has two stages. First, we jointly train a latent pivotal state model and a curiosity-driven goal-conditioned policy in a task-agnostic manner. Second, provided with the information from the world graph, a high-level Manager quickly finds solution to new tasks and expresses subgoals in reference to pivotal states to a low-level Worker. The Worker can then also leverage the graph to easily traverse to the pivotal states of interest, even across long distance, and explore non-locally. We perform a thorough ablation study to evaluate our approach on a suite of challenging maze tasks, demonstrating significant advantages from the proposed framework over baselines that lack world graph knowledge in terms of performance and efficiency.
The SpectACl of Nonconvex Clustering: A Spectral Approach to Density-Based Clustering
Authors: Sibylle Hess, Wouter Duivesteijn, Philipp Honysz, Katharina Morik
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Clustering Algorithms Evaluation

When it comes to clustering nonconvex shapes, two paradigms are used to find the most suitable clustering: minimum cut and maximum density. The most popular algorithms incorporating these paradigms are Spectral Clustering and DBSCAN. Both paradigms have their pros and cons. While minimum cut clusterings are sensitive to noise, density-based clusterings have trouble handling clusters with varying densities. In this paper, we propose \textsc{SpectACl}: a method combining the advantages of both approaches, while solving the two mentioned drawbacks. Our method is easy to implement, such as spectral clustering, and theoretically founded to optimize a proposed density criterion of clusterings. Through experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate that our approach provides robust and reliable clusterings.
The Trustworthy Pal: Controlling the False Discovery Rate in Boolean Matrix Factorization
Authors: Sibylle Hess, Nico Piatkowski, Katharina Morik
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00

Boolean matrix factorization (BMF) is a popular and powerful technique for inferring knowledge from data. The mining result is the Boolean product of two matrices, approximating the input dataset. The Boolean product is a disjunction of rank-1 binary matrices, each describing a feature-relation, called pattern, for a group of samples. Yet, there are no guarantees that any of the returned patterns do not actually arise from noise, i.e., are false discoveries. In this paper, we propose and discuss the usage of the false discovery rate in the unsupervised BMF setting. We prove two bounds on the probability that a found pattern is constituted of random Bernoulli-distributed noise. Each bound exploits a specific property of the factorization which minimizes the approximation error---yielding new insights on the minimizers of Boolean matrix factorization. This leads to improved BMF algorithms by replacing heuristic rank selection techniques with a theoretically well-based approach. Our empirical demonstration shows that both bounds deliver excellent results in various practical settings.
An Improvement of PAA on Trend-Based Approximation for Time Series
Authors: Chunkai Zhang, Yingyang Chen, Ao Yin, Zhen Qin, Xing Zhang, Keli Zhang, Zoe L. Jiang
Date: 2019-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Dimensionality Reduction, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Piecewise Aggregate Approximation (PAA) is a competitive basic dimension reduction method for high-dimensional time series mining. When deployed, however, the limitations are obvious that some important information will be missed, especially the trend. In this paper, we propose two new approaches for time series that utilize approximate trend feature information. Our first method is based on relative mean value of each segment to record the trend, which divide each segment into two parts and use the numerical average respectively to represent the trend. We proved that this method satisfies lower bound which guarantee no false dismissals. Our second method uses a binary string to record the trend which is also relative to mean in each segment. Our methods are applied on similarity measurement in classification and anomaly detection, the experimental results show the improvement of accuracy and effectiveness by extracting the trend feature suitably.
Anomaly Subsequence Detection with Dynamic Local Density for Time Series
Authors: Chunkai Zhang, Yingyang Chen, Ao Yin
Date: 2019-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Density Estimation, Dimensionality Reduction, Ensemble Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Anomaly subsequence detection is to detect inconsistent data, which always contains important information, among time series. Due to the high dimensionality of the time series, traditional anomaly detection often requires a large time overhead; furthermore, even if the dimensionality reduction techniques can improve the efficiency, they will lose some information and suffer from time drift and parameter tuning. In this paper, we propose a new anomaly subsequence detection with Dynamic Local Density Estimation (DLDE) to improve the detection effect without losing the trend information by dynamically dividing the time series using Time Split Tree. In order to avoid the impact of the hash function and the randomness of dynamic time segments, ensemble learning is used. Experimental results on different types of data sets verify that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-art methods, and the accuracy has big improvement.
Open Problem: The Oracle Complexity of Convex Optimization with Limited Memory
Authors: Blake Woodworth, Nathan Srebro
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00

We note that known methods achieving the optimal oracle complexity for first order convex optimization require quadratic memory, and ask whether this is necessary, and more broadly seek to characterize the minimax number of first order queries required to optimize a convex Lipschitz function subject to a memory constraint.
Exploiting Relevance for Online Decision-Making in High-Dimensions
Authors: Eralp Turgay, Cem Bulucu, Cem Tekin
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Many sequential decision-making tasks require choosing at each decision step the right action out of the vast set of possibilities by extracting actionable intelligence from high-dimensional data streams. Most of the times, the high-dimensionality of actions and data makes learning of the optimal actions by traditional learning methods impracticable. In this work, we investigate how to discover and leverage sparsity in actions and data to enable fast learning. As our learning model, we consider a structured contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) with high-dimensional arm (action) and context (data) sets, where the rewards depend only on a few relevant dimensions of the joint context-arm set, possibly in a non-linear way. We depart from the prior work by assuming a high-dimensional, continuum set of arms, and allow relevant context dimensions to vary for each arm. We propose a new online learning algorithm called {\em CMAB with Relevance Learning} (CMAB-RL) and prove that its time-averaged regret asymptotically goes to zero when the expected reward varies smoothly in contexts and arms. CMAB-RL enjoys a substantially improved regret bound compared to classical CMAB algorithms whose regrets depend on dimensions $d_x$ and $d_a$ of the context and arm sets. Importantly, we show that when the learner has prior knowledge on sparsity, given in terms of upper bounds $\overline{d}_x$ and $\overline{d}_a$ on the number of relevant dimensions, then CMAB-RL achieves $\tilde{O}(T^{1-1/(2+2\overline{d}_x +\overline{d}_a)})$ regret. Finally, we illustrate how CMAB algorithms can be used for optimal personalized blood glucose control in type 1 diabetes mellitus patients, and show that CMAB-RL outperforms other contextual MAB algorithms in this task.
Location Anomalies Detection for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles
Authors: Xiaoyang Wang, Ioannis Mavromatis, Andrea Tassi, Raul Santos-Rodriguez, Robert J. Piechocki
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Decision Making

Future Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV), and more generally ITS, will form a highly interconnected system. Such a paradigm is referred to as the Internet of Vehicles (herein Internet of CAVs) and is a prerequisite to orchestrate traffic flows in cities. For optimal decision making and supervision, traffic centres will have access to suitably anonymized CAV mobility information. Safe and secure operations will then be contingent on early detection of anomalies. In this paper, a novel unsupervised learning model based on deep autoencoder is proposed to detect the self-reported location anomaly in CAVs, using vehicle locations and the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) as features. Quantitative experiments on simulation datasets show that the proposed approach is effective and robust in detecting self-reported location anomalies.
Exponential Separations in Local Differential Privacy
Authors: Matthew Joseph, Jieming Mao, Aaron Roth
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00

We prove a general connection between the communication complexity of two-player games and the sample complexity of their multi-player locally private analogues. We use this connection to prove sample complexity lower bounds for locally differentially private protocols as straightforward corollaries of results from communication complexity. In particular, we 1) use a communication lower bound for the hidden layers problem to prove an exponential sample complexity separation between sequentially and fully interactive locally private protocols, and 2) use a communication lower bound for the pointer chasing problem to prove an exponential sample complexity separation between $k$ round and $k+1$ round sequentially interactive locally private protocols, for every $k$.
Equation Discovery for Nonlinear System Identification
Authors: Nikola Simidjievski, Ljupčo Todorovski, Juš Kocijan, Sašo Džeroski
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Equation Discovery, parameter estimation

Equation discovery methods enable modelers to combine domain-specific knowledge and system identification to construct models most suitable for a selected modeling task. The method described and evaluated in this paper can be used as a nonlinear system identification method for gray-box modeling. It consists of two interlaced parts of modeling that are computer-aided. The first performs computer-aided identification of a model structure composed of elements selected from user-specified domain-specific modeling knowledge, while the second part performs parameter estimation. In this paper, recent developments of the equation discovery method called process-based modeling, suited for nonlinear system identification, are elaborated and illustrated on two continuous-time case studies. The first case study illustrates the use of the process-based modeling on synthetic data while the second case-study evaluates on measured data for a standard system-identification benchmark. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the ability of process-based modeling to reconstruct both model structure and parameters from measured data.
iPool -- Information-based Pooling in Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Xing Gao, Hongkai Xiong, Pascal Frossard
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Classification

With the advent of data science, the analysis of network or graph data has become a very timely research problem. A variety of recent works have been proposed to generalize neural networks to graphs, either from a spectral graph theory or a spatial perspective. The majority of these works however focus on adapting the convolution operator to graph representation. At the same time, the pooling operator also plays an important role in distilling multiscale and hierarchical representations but it has been mostly overlooked so far. In this paper, we propose a parameter-free pooling operator, called iPool, that permits to retain the most informative features in arbitrary graphs. With the argument that informative nodes dominantly characterize graph signals, we propose a criterion to evaluate the amount of information of each node given its neighbors, and theoretically demonstrate its relationship to neighborhood conditional entropy. This new criterion determines how nodes are selected and coarsened graphs are constructed in the pooling layer. The resulting hierarchical structure yields an effective isomorphism-invariant representation of networked data in arbitrary topologies. The proposed strategy is evaluated in terms of graph classification on a collection of public graph datasets, including bioinformatics and social networks, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on most of the datasets.
MULEX: Disentangling Exploitation from Exploration in Deep RL
Authors: Lucas Beyer, Damien Vincent, Olivier Teboul, Sylvain Gelly, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00

An agent learning through interactions should balance its action selection process between probing the environment to discover new rewards and using the information acquired in the past to adopt useful behaviour. This trade-off is usually obtained by perturbing either the agent's actions (e.g., e-greedy or Gibbs sampling) or the agent's parameters (e.g., NoisyNet), or by modifying the reward it receives (e.g., exploration bonus, intrinsic motivation, or hand-shaped rewards). Here, we adopt a disruptive but simple and generic perspective, where we explicitly disentangle exploration and exploitation. Different losses are optimized in parallel, one of them coming from the true objective (maximizing cumulative rewards from the environment) and others being related to exploration. Every loss is used in turn to learn a policy that generates transitions, all shared in a single replay buffer. Off-policy methods are then applied to these transitions to optimize each loss. We showcase our approach on a hard-exploration environment, show its sample-efficiency and robustness, and discuss further implications.
Neural Logic Rule Layers
Authors: Jan Niclas Reimann, Andreas Schwung
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00

Despite their great success in recent years, deep neural networks (DNN) are mainly black boxes where the results obtained by running through the network are difficult to understand and interpret. Compared to e.g. decision trees or bayesian classifiers, DNN suffer from bad interpretability where we understand by interpretability, that a human can easily derive the relations modeled by the network. A reasonable way to provide interpretability for humans are logical rules. In this paper we propose neural logic rule layers (NLRL) which are able to represent arbitrary logic rules in terms of their conjunctive and disjunctive normal forms. Using various NLRL within one layer and correspondingly stacking various layers, we are able to represent arbitrary complex rules by the resulting neural network architecture. The NLRL are end-to-end trainable allowing to learn logic rules directly from available data sets. Experiments show that NLRL-enhanced neural networks can learn to model arbitrary complex logic and perform arithmetic operation over the input values.
On mechanisms for transfer using landmark value functions in multi-task lifelong reinforcement learning
Authors: Nick Denis
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Transfer Learning

Transfer learning across different reinforcement learning (RL) tasks is becoming an increasingly valuable area of research. We consider a goal-based multi-task RL framework and mechanisms by which previously solved tasks can reduce sample complexity and regret when the agent is faced with a new task. Specifically, we introduce two metrics on the state space that encode notions of traversibility of the state space for an agent. Using these metrics a topological covering is constructed by way of a set of landmark states in a fully self-supervised manner. We show that these landmark coverings confer theoretical advantages for transfer learning within the goal-based multi-task RL setting. Specifically, we demonstrate three mechanisms by which landmark coverings can be used for successful transfer learning. First, we extend the Landmark Options Via Reflection (LOVR) framework to this new topological covering; second, we use the landmark-centric value functions themselves as features and define a greedy zombie policy that achieves near oracle performance on a sequence of zero-shot transfer tasks; finally, motivated by the second transfer mechanism, we introduce a learned reward function that provides a more dense reward signal for goal-based RL. Our novel topological landmark covering confers beneficial theoretical results, bounding the Q values at each state-action pair. In doing so, we introduce a mechanism that performs action-pruning at infeasible actions which cannot possibly be part of an optimal policy for the current goal.
Comment on "Adv-BNN: Improved Adversarial Defense through Robust Bayesian Neural Network"
Authors: Roland S. Zimmermann
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Defense

A recent paper by Liu et al. combines the topics of adversarial training and Bayesian Neural Networks (BNN) and suggests that adversarially trained BNNs are more robust against adversarial attacks than their non-Bayesian counterparts. Here, I analyze the proposed defense and suggest that one needs to adjust the adversarial attack to incorporate the stochastic nature of a Bayesian network to perform an accurate evaluation of its robustness. Using this new type of attack I show that there appears to be no strong evidence for higher robustness of the adversarially trained BNNs.
An Open Source AutoML Benchmark
Authors: Pieter Gijsbers, Erin LeDell, Janek Thomas, Sébastien Poirier, Bernd Bischl, Joaquin Vanschoren
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, BIG-bench Machine Learning

In recent years, an active field of research has developed around automated machine learning (AutoML). Unfortunately, comparing different AutoML systems is hard and often done incorrectly. We introduce an open, ongoing, and extensible benchmark framework which follows best practices and avoids common mistakes. The framework is open-source, uses public datasets and has a website with up-to-date results. We use the framework to conduct a thorough comparison of 4 AutoML systems across 39 datasets and analyze the results.
Active Learning within Constrained Environments through Imitation of an Expert Questioner
Authors: Kalesha Bullard, Yannick Schroecker, Sonia Chernova
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Imitation Learning

Active learning agents typically employ a query selection algorithm which solely considers the agent's learning objectives. However, this may be insufficient in more realistic human domains. This work uses imitation learning to enable an agent in a constrained environment to concurrently reason about both its internal learning goals and environmental constraints externally imposed, all within its objective function. Experiments are conducted on a concept learning task to test generalization of the proposed algorithm to different environmental conditions and analyze how time and resource constraints impact efficacy of solving the learning problem. Our findings show the environmentally-aware learning agent is able to statistically outperform all other active learners explored under most of the constrained conditions. A key implication is adaptation for active learning agents to more realistic human environments, where constraints are often externally imposed on the learner.
Mise en abyme with artificial intelligence: how to predict the accuracy of NN, applied to hyper-parameter tuning
Authors: Giorgia Franchini, Mathilde Galinier, Micaela Verucchi
Date: 2019-06-28 00:00:00

In the context of deep learning, the costliest phase from a computational point of view is the full training of the learning algorithm. However, this process is to be used a significant number of times during the design of a new artificial neural network, leading therefore to extremely expensive operations. Here, we propose a low-cost strategy to predict the accuracy of the algorithm, based only on its initial behaviour. To do so, we train the network of interest up to convergence several times, modifying its characteristics at each training. The initial and final accuracies observed during this beforehand process are stored in a database. We then make use of both curve fitting and Support Vector Machines techniques, the latter being trained on the created database, to predict the accuracy of the network, given its accuracy on the primary iterations of its learning. This approach can be of particular interest when the space of the characteristics of the network is notably large or when its full training is highly time-consuming. The results we obtained are promising and encouraged us to apply this strategy to a topical issue: hyper-parameter optimisation (HO). In particular, we focused on the HO of a convolutional neural network for the classification of the databases MNIST and CIFAR-10. By using our method of prediction, and an algorithm implemented by us for a probabilistic exploration of the hyper-parameter space, we were able to find the hyper-parameter settings corresponding to the optimal accuracies already known in literature, at a quite low-cost.
Stochastic Latent Actor-Critic: Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Latent Variable Model
Authors: Alex X. Lee, Anusha Nagabandi, Pieter Abbeel, Sergey Levine
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Representation Learning

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must now solve two problems: representation learning and task learning. In this work, we tackle these two problems separately, by explicitly learning latent representations that can accelerate reinforcement learning from images. We propose the stochastic latent actor-critic (SLAC) algorithm: a sample-efficient and high-performing RL algorithm for learning policies for complex continuous control tasks directly from high-dimensional image inputs. SLAC provides a novel and principled approach for unifying stochastic sequential models and RL into a single method, by learning a compact latent representation and then performing RL in the model's learned latent space. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method outperforms both model-free and model-based alternatives in terms of final performance and sample efficiency, on a range of difficult image-based control tasks. Our code and videos of our results are available at our website.