pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
WD3: Taming the Estimation Bias in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Qiang He, Xinwen Hou
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, OpenAI Gym, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The overestimation phenomenon caused by function approximation is a well-known issue in value-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as deep Q-networks and DDPG, which could lead to suboptimal policies. To address this issue, TD3 takes the minimum value between a pair of critics. In this paper, we show that the TD3 algorithm introduces underestimation bias in mild assumptions. To obtain a more precise estimation for value function, we unify these two opposites and propose a novel algorithm \underline{W}eighted \underline{D}elayed \underline{D}eep \underline{D}eterministic Policy Gradient (WD3), which can eliminate the estimation bias and further improve the performance by weighting a pair of critics. To demonstrate the effectiveness of WD3, we compare the learning process of value function between DDPG, TD3, and WD3. The results verify that our algorithm does eliminate the estimation error of value functions. Furthermore, we evaluate our algorithm on the continuous control tasks. We observe that in each test task, the performance of WD3 consistently outperforms, or at the very least matches, that of the state-of-the-art algorithms\footnote{Our code is available at~\href{https://sites.google.com/view/ictai20-wd3/}{https://sites.google.com/view/ictai20-wd3/}.}.
Information-theoretic User Interaction: Significant Inputs for Program Synthesis
Authors: Ashish Tiwari, Arjun Radhakrishna, Sumit Gulwani, Daniel Perelman
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Program Synthesis

Programming-by-example technologies are being deployed in industrial products for real-time synthesis of various kinds of data transformations. These technologies rely on the user to provide few representative examples of the transformation task. Motivated by the need to find the most pertinent question to ask the user, in this paper, we introduce the {\em significant questions problem}, and show that it is hard in general. We then develop an information-theoretic greedy approach for solving the problem. We justify the greedy algorithm using the conditional entropy result, which informally says that the question that achieves the maximum information gain is the one that we know least about. In the context of interactive program synthesis, we use the above result to develop an {\em{active program learner}} that generates the significant inputs to pose as queries to the user in each iteration. The procedure requires extending a {\em{passive program learner}} to a {\em{sampling program learner}} that is able to sample candidate programs from the set of all consistent programs to enable estimation of information gain. It also uses clustering of inputs based on features in the inputs and the corresponding outputs to sample a small set of candidate significant inputs. Our active learner is able to tradeoff false negatives for false positives and converge in a small number of iterations on a real-world dataset of %around 800 string transformation tasks.
Limits of Transfer Learning
Authors: Jake Williams, Abel Tadesse, Tyler Sam, Huey Sun, George D. Montanez
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Transfer learning involves taking information and insight from one problem domain and applying it to a new problem domain. Although widely used in practice, theory for transfer learning remains less well-developed. To address this, we prove several novel results related to transfer learning, showing the need to carefully select which sets of information to transfer and the need for dependence between transferred information and target problems. Furthermore, we prove how the degree of probabilistic change in an algorithm using transfer learning places an upper bound on the amount of improvement possible. These results build on the algorithmic search framework for machine learning, allowing the results to apply to a wide range of learning problems using transfer.
Security and Privacy Preserving Deep Learning
Authors: Saichethan Miriyala Reddy, Saisree Miriyala
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving, Privacy Preserving Deep Learning

Commercial companies that collect user data on a large scale have been the main beneficiaries of this trend since the success of deep learning techniques is directly proportional to the amount of data available for training. Massive data collection required for deep learning presents obvious privacy issues. Users personal, highly sensitive data such as photos and voice recordings are kept indefinitely by the companies that collect it. Users can neither delete it nor restrict the purposes for which it is used. So, data privacy has been a very important concern for governments and companies these days. It gives rise to a very interesting challenge since on the one hand, we are pushing further and further for high-quality models and accessible data, but on the other hand, we need to keep data safe from both intentional and accidental leakage. The more personal the data is it is more restricted it means some of the most important social issues cannot be addressed using machine learning because researchers do not have access to proper training data. But by learning how to machine learning that protects privacy we can make a huge difference in solving many social issues like curing disease etc. Deep neural networks are susceptible to various inference attacks as they remember information about their training data. In this chapter, we introduce differential privacy, which ensures that different kinds of statistical analyses dont compromise privacy and federated learning, training a machine learning model on a data to which we do not have access to.
Unsupervised Evaluation of Interactive Dialog with DialoGPT
Authors: Shikib Mehri, Maxine Eskenazi
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: SIGDIAL (ACL) 2020 7
Tasks: Dialogue Evaluation, Open-Domain Dialog, Text Generation

It is important to define meaningful and interpretable automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialog research. Standard language generation metrics have been shown to be ineffective for dialog. This paper introduces the FED metric (fine-grained evaluation of dialog), an automatic evaluation metric which uses DialoGPT, without any fine-tuning or supervision. It also introduces the FED dataset which is constructed by annotating a set of human-system and human-human conversations with eighteen fine-grained dialog qualities. The FED metric (1) does not rely on a ground-truth response, (2) does not require training data and (3) measures fine-grained dialog qualities at both the turn and whole dialog levels. FED attains moderate to strong correlation with human judgement at both levels.
Long-Term Prediction of Lane Change Maneuver Through a Multilayer Perceptron
Authors: Zhenyu Shou, Ziran Wang, Kyungtae Han, Yongkang Liu, Prashant Tiwari, Xuan Di
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Prediction

Behavior prediction plays an essential role in both autonomous driving systems and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), since it enhances vehicle's awareness of the imminent hazards in the surrounding environment. Many existing lane change prediction models take as input lateral or angle information and make short-term (< 5 seconds) maneuver predictions. In this study, we propose a longer-term (5~10 seconds) prediction model without any lateral or angle information. Three prediction models are introduced, including a logistic regression model, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model, and a recurrent neural network (RNN) model, and their performances are compared by using the real-world NGSIM dataset. To properly label the trajectory data, this study proposes a new time-window labeling scheme by adding a time gap between positive and negative samples. Two approaches are also proposed to address the unstable prediction issue, where the aggressive approach propagates each positive prediction for certain seconds, while the conservative approach adopts a roll-window average to smooth the prediction. Evaluation results show that the developed prediction model is able to capture 75% of real lane change maneuvers with an average advanced prediction time of 8.05 seconds.
RayS: A Ray Searching Method for Hard-label Adversarial Attack
Authors: Jinghui Chen, Quanquan Gu
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Hard-label Attack

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Among different attack settings, the most challenging yet the most practical one is the hard-label setting where the attacker only has access to the hard-label output (prediction label) of the target model. Previous attempts are neither effective enough in terms of attack success rate nor efficient enough in terms of query complexity under the widely used $L_\infty$ norm threat model. In this paper, we present the Ray Searching attack (RayS), which greatly improves the hard-label attack effectiveness as well as efficiency. Unlike previous works, we reformulate the continuous problem of finding the closest decision boundary into a discrete problem that does not require any zeroth-order gradient estimation. In the meantime, all unnecessary searches are eliminated via a fast check step. This significantly reduces the number of queries needed for our hard-label attack. Moreover, interestingly, we found that the proposed RayS attack can also be used as a sanity check for possible "falsely robust" models. On several recently proposed defenses that claim to achieve the state-of-the-art robust accuracy, our attack method demonstrates that the current white-box/black-box attacks could still give a false sense of security and the robust accuracy drop between the most popular PGD attack and RayS attack could be as large as $28\%$. We believe that our proposed RayS attack could help identify falsely robust models that beat most white-box/black-box attacks.
Lumos: A Library for Diagnosing Metric Regressions in Web-Scale Applications
Authors: Jamie Pool, Ebrahim Beyrami, Vishak Gopal, Ashkan Aazami, Jayant Gupchup, Jeff Rowland, Binlong Li, Pritesh Kanani, Ross Cutler, Johannes Gehrke
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

Web-scale applications can ship code on a daily to weekly cadence. These applications rely on online metrics to monitor the health of new releases. Regressions in metric values need to be detected and diagnosed as early as possible to reduce the disruption to users and product owners. Regressions in metrics can surface due to a variety of reasons: genuine product regressions, changes in user population, and bias due to telemetry loss (or processing) are among the common causes. Diagnosing the cause of these metric regressions is costly for engineering teams as they need to invest time in finding the root cause of the issue as soon as possible. We present Lumos, a Python library built using the principles of AB testing to systematically diagnose metric regressions to automate such analysis. Lumos has been deployed across the component teams in Microsoft's Real-Time Communication applications Skype and Microsoft Teams. It has enabled engineering teams to detect 100s of real changes in metrics and reject 1000s of false alarms detected by anomaly detectors. The application of Lumos has resulted in freeing up as much as 95% of the time allocated to metric-based investigations. In this work, we open source Lumos and present our results from applying it to two different components within the RTC group over millions of sessions. This general library can be coupled with any production system to manage the volume of alerting efficiently.
Automatic Data Augmentation for Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Roberta Raileanu, Max Goldstein, Denis Yarats, Ilya Kostrikov, Rob Fergus
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often fail to generalize to unseen scenarios, even when they are trained on many instances of semantically similar environments. Data augmentation has recently been shown to improve the sample efficiency and generalization of RL agents. However, different tasks tend to benefit from different kinds of data augmentation. In this paper, we compare three approaches for automatically finding an appropriate augmentation. These are combined with two novel regularization terms for the policy and value function, required to make the use of data augmentation theoretically sound for certain actor-critic algorithms. We evaluate our methods on the Procgen benchmark which consists of 16 procedurally-generated environments and show that it improves test performance by ~40% relative to standard RL algorithms. Our agent outperforms other baselines specifically designed to improve generalization in RL. In addition, we show that our agent learns policies and representations that are more robust to changes in the environment that do not affect the agent, such as the background. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/rraileanu/auto-drac.
Coverage Path Planning with Track Spacing Adaptation for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
Authors: Veronika Yordanova, Bart Gips
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

In this paper we address the mine countermeasures (MCM) search problem for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) surveying the seabed using a side-looking sonar. We propose a coverage path planning method that adapts the AUV track spacing with the objective of collecting better data. We achieve this by shifting the coverage overlap at the tail of the sensor range where the lowest data quality is expected. To assess the algorithm, we collected data from three at-sea experiments. The adaptive survey allowed the AUV to recover from a situation where the sensor range was overestimated and resulted in reducing area coverage gaps. In another experiment,the adaptive survey showed a 4.2% improvement in data quality for nearly 30% of the 'worst' data.
dm_control: Software and Tasks for Continuous Control
Authors: Yuval Tassa, Saran Tunyasuvunakool, Alistair Muldal, Yotam Doron, Piotr Trochim, Si-Qi Liu, Steven Bohez, Josh Merel, Tom Erez, Timothy Lillicrap, Nicolas Heess
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The dm_control software package is a collection of Python libraries and task suites for reinforcement learning agents in an articulated-body simulation. A MuJoCo wrapper provides convenient bindings to functions and data structures. The PyMJCF and Composer libraries enable procedural model manipulation and task authoring. The Control Suite is a fixed set of tasks with standardised structure, intended to serve as performance benchmarks. The Locomotion framework provides high-level abstractions and examples of locomotion tasks. A set of configurable manipulation tasks with a robot arm and snap-together bricks is also included. dm_control is publicly available at https://www.github.com/deepmind/dm_control
Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Discounted MDPs with Feature Mapping
Authors: Dongruo Zhou, Jiafan He, Quanquan Gu
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study reinforcement learning for discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the transition kernel can be parameterized as a linear function of certain feature mapping. We propose a novel algorithm that makes use of the feature mapping and obtains a $\tilde O(d\sqrt{T}/(1-\gamma)^2)$ regret, where $d$ is the dimension of the feature space, $T$ is the time horizon and $\gamma$ is the discount factor of the MDP. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first polynomial regret bound without accessing the generative model or making strong assumptions such as ergodicity of the MDP. By constructing a special class of MDPs, we also show that for any algorithms, the regret is lower bounded by $\Omega(d\sqrt{T}/(1-\gamma)^{1.5})$. Our upper and lower bound results together suggest that the proposed reinforcement learning algorithm is near-optimal up to a $(1-\gamma)^{-0.5}$ factor.
Expert-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Offline Policy Learning and Evaluation
Authors: Aaron Sonabend-W, Junwei Lu, Leo A. Celi, Tianxi Cai, Peter Szolovits
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Two-sample testing, Uncertainty Quantification

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning optimal policies in environments where direct exploration is expensive or unfeasible. However, the adoption of such policies in practice is often challenging, as they are hard to interpret within the application context, and lack measures of uncertainty for the learned policy value and its decisions. To overcome these issues, we propose an Expert-Supervised RL (ESRL) framework which uses uncertainty quantification for offline policy learning. In particular, we have three contributions: 1) the method can learn safe and optimal policies through hypothesis testing, 2) ESRL allows for different levels of risk averse implementations tailored to the application context, and finally, 3) we propose a way to interpret ESRL's policy at every state through posterior distributions, and use this framework to compute off-policy value function posteriors. We provide theoretical guarantees for our estimators and regret bounds consistent with Posterior Sampling for RL (PSRL). Sample efficiency of ESRL is independent of the chosen risk aversion threshold and quality of the behavior policy.
Long-Horizon Visual Planning with Goal-Conditioned Hierarchical Predictors
Authors: Karl Pertsch, Oleh Rybkin, Frederik Ebert, Chelsea Finn, Dinesh Jayaraman, Sergey Levine
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Prediction

The ability to predict and plan into the future is fundamental for agents acting in the world. To reach a faraway goal, we predict trajectories at multiple timescales, first devising a coarse plan towards the goal and then gradually filling in details. In contrast, current learning approaches for visual prediction and planning fail on long-horizon tasks as they generate predictions (1) without considering goal information, and (2) at the finest temporal resolution, one step at a time. In this work we propose a framework for visual prediction and planning that is able to overcome both of these limitations. First, we formulate the problem of predicting towards a goal and propose the corresponding class of latent space goal-conditioned predictors (GCPs). GCPs significantly improve planning efficiency by constraining the search space to only those trajectories that reach the goal. Further, we show how GCPs can be naturally formulated as hierarchical models that, given two observations, predict an observation between them, and by recursively subdividing each part of the trajectory generate complete sequences. This divide-and-conquer strategy is effective at long-term prediction, and enables us to design an effective hierarchical planning algorithm that optimizes trajectories in a coarse-to-fine manner. We show that by using both goal-conditioning and hierarchical prediction, GCPs enable us to solve visual planning tasks with much longer horizon than previously possible.
Feature Expansive Reward Learning: Rethinking Human Input
Authors: Andreea Bobu, Marius Wiggert, Claire Tomlin, Anca D. Dragan
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

When a person is not satisfied with how a robot performs a task, they can intervene to correct it. Reward learning methods enable the robot to adapt its reward function online based on such human input, but they rely on handcrafted features. When the correction cannot be explained by these features, recent work in deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) suggests that the robot could ask for task demonstrations and recover a reward defined over the raw state space. Our insight is that rather than implicitly learning about the missing feature(s) from demonstrations, the robot should instead ask for data that explicitly teaches it about what it is missing. We introduce a new type of human input in which the person guides the robot from states where the feature being taught is highly expressed to states where it is not. We propose an algorithm for learning the feature from the raw state space and integrating it into the reward function. By focusing the human input on the missing feature, our method decreases sample complexity and improves generalization of the learned reward over the above deep IRL baseline. We show this in experiments with a physical 7DOF robot manipulator, as well as in a user study conducted in a simulated environment.
Opportunities and Challenges in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): A Survey
Authors: Arun Das, Paul Rad
Date: 2020-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Survey

Nowadays, deep neural networks are widely used in mission critical systems such as healthcare, self-driving vehicles, and military which have direct impact on human lives. However, the black-box nature of deep neural networks challenges its use in mission critical applications, raising ethical and judicial concerns inducing lack of trust. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that promotes a set of tools, techniques, and algorithms that can generate high-quality interpretable, intuitive, human-understandable explanations of AI decisions. In addition to providing a holistic view of the current XAI landscape in deep learning, this paper provides mathematical summaries of seminal work. We start by proposing a taxonomy and categorizing the XAI techniques based on their scope of explanations, methodology behind the algorithms, and explanation level or usage which helps build trustworthy, interpretable, and self-explanatory deep learning models. We then describe the main principles used in XAI research and present the historical timeline for landmark studies in XAI from 2007 to 2020. After explaining each category of algorithms and approaches in detail, we then evaluate the explanation maps generated by eight XAI algorithms on image data, discuss the limitations of this approach, and provide potential future directions to improve XAI evaluation.
A Multiscale Graph Convolutional Network Using Hierarchical Clustering
Authors: Alex Lipov, Pietro Liò
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Molecular Property Prediction, Prediction, Property Prediction, Protein Interface Prediction

The information contained in hierarchical topology, intrinsic to many networks, is currently underutilised. A novel architecture is explored which exploits this information through a multiscale decomposition. A dendrogram is produced by a Girvan-Newman hierarchical clustering algorithm. It is segmented and fed through graph convolutional layers, allowing the architecture to learn multiple scale latent space representations of the network, from fine to coarse grained. The architecture is tested on a benchmark citation network, demonstrating competitive performance. Given the abundance of hierarchical networks, possible applications include quantum molecular property prediction, protein interface prediction and multiscale computational substrates for partial differential equations.