pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SMAC: Symbiotic Multi-Agent Construction
Authors: Caleb Wagner, Neel Dhanaraj, Trevor Rizzo, Josue Contreras, Hannan Liang, Gregory Lewin, Carlo Pinciroli
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, SMAC, SMAC+

We present a novel concept of a heterogeneous, distributed platform for autonomous 3D construction. The platform is composed of two types of robots acting in a coordinated and complementary fashion: (i) A collection of communicating smart construction blocks behaving as a form of growable smart matter, and capable of planning and monitoring their own state and the construction progress; and (ii) A team of inchworm-shaped builder robots designed to navigate and modify the 3D structure, following the guidance of the smart blocks. We describe the design of the hardware and introduce algorithms for navigation and construction that support a wide class of 3D structures. We demonstrate the capabilities of our concept and characterize its performance through simulations and real-robot experiments.
AAMDRL: Augmented Asset Management with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Eric Benhamou, David Saltiel, Sandrine Ungari, Abhishek Mukhopadhyay, Jamal Atif
Date: 2020-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Asset Management, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Management, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Can an agent learn efficiently in a noisy and self adapting environment with sequential, non-stationary and non-homogeneous observations? Through trading bots, we illustrate how Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) can tackle this challenge. Our contributions are threefold: (i) the use of contextual information also referred to as augmented state in DRL, (ii) the impact of a one period lag between observations and actions that is more realistic for an asset management environment, (iii) the implementation of a new repetitive train test method called walk forward analysis, similar in spirit to cross validation for time series. Although our experiment is on trading bots, it can easily be translated to other bot environments that operate in sequential environment with regime changes and noisy data. Our experiment for an augmented asset manager interested in finding the best portfolio for hedging strategies shows that AAMDRL achieves superior returns and lower risk.
Learnable Graph-regularization for Matrix Decomposition
Authors: Penglong Zhai, Shihua Zhang
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction

Low-rank approximation models of data matrices have become important machine learning and data mining tools in many fields including computer vision, text mining, bioinformatics and many others. They allow for embedding high-dimensional data into low-dimensional spaces, which mitigates the effects of noise and uncovers latent relations. In order to make the learned representations inherit the structures in the original data, graph-regularization terms are often added to the loss function. However, the prior graph construction often fails to reflect the true network connectivity and the intrinsic relationships. In addition, many graph-regularized methods fail to take the dual spaces into account. Probabilistic models are often used to model the distribution of the representations, but most of previous methods often assume that the hidden variables are independent and identically distributed for simplicity. To this end, we propose a learnable graph-regularization model for matrix decomposition (LGMD), which builds a bridge between graph-regularized methods and probabilistic matrix decomposition models. LGMD learns two graphical structures (i.e., two precision matrices) in real-time in an iterative manner via sparse precision matrix estimation and is more robust to noise and missing entries. Extensive numerical results and comparison with competing methods demonstrate its effectiveness.
Multi-Agent Collaboration via Reward Attribution Decomposition
Authors: Tianjun Zhang, Huazhe Xu, Xiaolong Wang, Yi Wu, Kurt Keutzer, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Yuandong Tian
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Dota 2, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, Starcraft

Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) have achieved super-human performance in games like Quake 3 and Dota 2. Unfortunately, these techniques require orders-of-magnitude more training rounds than humans and don't generalize to new agent configurations even on the same game. In this work, we propose Collaborative Q-learning (CollaQ) that achieves state-of-the-art performance in the StarCraft multi-agent challenge and supports ad hoc team play. We first formulate multi-agent collaboration as a joint optimization on reward assignment and show that each agent has an approximately optimal policy that decomposes into two parts: one part that only relies on the agent's own state, and the other part that is related to states of nearby agents. Following this novel finding, CollaQ decomposes the Q-function of each agent into a self term and an interactive term, with a Multi-Agent Reward Attribution (MARA) loss that regularizes the training. CollaQ is evaluated on various StarCraft maps and shows that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques (i.e., QMIX, QTRAN, and VDN) by improving the win rate by 40% with the same number of samples. In the more challenging ad hoc team play setting (i.e., reweight/add/remove units without re-training or finetuning), CollaQ outperforms previous SoTA by over 30%.
Towards Accurate Knowledge Transfer via Target-awareness Representation Disentanglement
Authors: Xingjian Li, Di Hu, Xuhong LI, Haoyi Xiong, Zhi Ye, Zhipeng Wang, Chengzhong Xu, Dejing Dou
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Transfer Learning

Fine-tuning deep neural networks pre-trained on large scale datasets is one of the most practical transfer learning paradigm given limited quantity of training samples. To obtain better generalization, using the starting point as the reference (SPAR), either through weights or features, has been successfully applied to transfer learning as a regularizer. However, due to the domain discrepancy between the source and target task, there exists obvious risk of negative transfer in a straightforward manner of knowledge preserving. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning algorithm, introducing the idea of Target-awareness REpresentation Disentanglement (TRED), where the relevant knowledge with respect to the target task is disentangled from the original source model and used as a regularizer during fine-tuning the target model. Specifically, we design two alternative methods, maximizing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (Max-MMD) and minimizing the mutual information (Min-MI), for the representation disentanglement. Experiments on various real world datasets show that our method stably improves the standard fine-tuning by more than 2% in average. TRED also outperforms related state-of-the-art transfer learning regularizers such as L2-SP, AT, DELTA, and BSS.
Latent Vector Recovery of Audio GANs
Authors: Andrew Keyes, Nicky Bayat, Vahid Reza Khazaie, Yalda Mohsenzadeh
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00

Advanced Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are remarkable in generating intelligible audio from a random latent vector. In this paper, we examine the task of recovering the latent vector of both synthesized and real audio. Previous works recovered latent vectors of given audio through an auto-encoder inspired technique that trains an encoder network either in parallel with the GAN or after the generator is trained. With our approach, we train a deep residual neural network architecture to project audio synthesized by WaveGAN into the corresponding latent space with near identical reconstruction performance. To accommodate for the lack of an original latent vector for real audio, we optimize the residual network on the perceptual loss between the real audio samples and the reconstructed audio of the predicted latent vectors. In the case of synthesized audio, the Mean Squared Error (MSE) between the ground truth and recovered latent vector is minimized as well. We further investigated the audio reconstruction performance when several gradient optimization steps are applied to the predicted latent vector. Through our deep neural network based method of training on real and synthesized audio, we are able to predict a latent vector that corresponds to a reasonable reconstruction of real audio. Even though we evaluated our method on WaveGAN, our proposed method is universal and can be applied to any other GANs.
Semi-supervised NMF Models for Topic Modeling in Learning Tasks
Authors: Jamie Haddock, Lara Kassab, Sixian Li, Alona Kryshchenko, Rachel Grotheer, Elena Sizikova, Chuntian Wang, Thomas Merkh, R. W. M. A. Madushani, Miju Ahn, Deanna Needell, Kathryn Leonard
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Text Classification

We propose several new models for semi-supervised nonnegative matrix factorization (SSNMF) and provide motivation for SSNMF models as maximum likelihood estimators given specific distributions of uncertainty. We present multiplicative updates training methods for each new model, and demonstrate the application of these models to classification, although they are flexible to other supervised learning tasks. We illustrate the promise of these models and training methods on both synthetic and real data, and achieve high classification accuracy on the 20 Newsgroups dataset.
Bilevel Optimization: Convergence Analysis and Enhanced Design
Authors: Kaiyi Ji, Junjie Yang, Yingbin Liang
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization, Hyperparameter Optimization, Meta-Learning

Bilevel optimization has arisen as a powerful tool for many machine learning problems such as meta-learning, hyperparameter optimization, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we investigate the nonconvex-strongly-convex bilevel optimization problem. For deterministic bilevel optimization, we provide a comprehensive convergence rate analysis for two popular algorithms respectively based on approximate implicit differentiation (AID) and iterative differentiation (ITD). For the AID-based method, we orderwisely improve the previous convergence rate analysis due to a more practical parameter selection as well as a warm start strategy, and for the ITD-based method we establish the first theoretical convergence rate. Our analysis also provides a quantitative comparison between ITD and AID based approaches. For stochastic bilevel optimization, we propose a novel algorithm named stocBiO, which features a sample-efficient hypergradient estimator using efficient Jacobian- and Hessian-vector product computations. We provide the convergence rate guarantee for stocBiO, and show that stocBiO outperforms the best known computational complexities orderwisely with respect to the condition number $\kappa$ and the target accuracy $\epsilon$. We further validate our theoretical results and demonstrate the efficiency of bilevel optimization algorithms by the experiments on meta-learning and hyperparameter optimization.
Empirical Study of Transformers for Source Code
Authors: Nadezhda Chirkova, Sergey Troshin
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Bug fixing, Code Completion

Initially developed for natural language processing (NLP), Transformers are now widely used for source code processing, due to the format similarity between source code and text. In contrast to natural language, source code is strictly structured, i.e., it follows the syntax of the programming language. Several recent works develop Transformer modifications for capturing syntactic information in source code. The drawback of these works is that they do not compare to each other and consider different tasks. In this work, we conduct a thorough empirical study of the capabilities of Transformers to utilize syntactic information in different tasks. We consider three tasks (code completion, function naming and bug fixing) and re-implement different syntax-capturing modifications in a unified framework. We show that Transformers are able to make meaningful predictions based purely on syntactic information and underline the best practices of taking the syntactic information into account for improving the performance of the model.
Maximum-Entropy Adversarial Data Augmentation for Improved Generalization and Robustness
Authors: Long Zhao, Ting Liu, Xi Peng, Dimitris Metaxas
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Adversarial data augmentation has shown promise for training robust deep neural networks against unforeseen data shifts or corruptions. However, it is difficult to define heuristics to generate effective fictitious target distributions containing "hard" adversarial perturbations that are largely different from the source distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective regularization term for adversarial data augmentation. We theoretically derive it from the information bottleneck principle, which results in a maximum-entropy formulation. Intuitively, this regularization term encourages perturbing the underlying source distribution to enlarge predictive uncertainty of the current model, so that the generated "hard" adversarial perturbations can improve the model robustness during training. Experimental results on three standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the existing state of the art by a statistically significant margin.
Data Valuation for Medical Imaging Using Shapley Value: Application on A Large-scale Chest X-ray Dataset
Authors: Siyi Tang, Amirata Ghorbani, Rikiya Yamashita, Sameer Rehman, Jared A. Dunnmon, James Zou, Daniel L. Rubin
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Valuation, Pneumonia Detection

The reliability of machine learning models can be compromised when trained on low quality data. Many large-scale medical imaging datasets contain low quality labels extracted from sources such as medical reports. Moreover, images within a dataset may have heterogeneous quality due to artifacts and biases arising from equipment or measurement errors. Therefore, algorithms that can automatically identify low quality data are highly desired. In this study, we used data Shapley, a data valuation metric, to quantify the value of training data to the performance of a pneumonia detection algorithm in a large chest X-ray dataset. We characterized the effectiveness of data Shapley in identifying low quality versus valuable data for pneumonia detection. We found that removing training data with high Shapley values decreased the pneumonia detection performance, whereas removing data with low Shapley values improved the model performance. Furthermore, there were more mislabeled examples in low Shapley value data and more true pneumonia cases in high Shapley value data. Our results suggest that low Shapley value indicates mislabeled or poor quality images, whereas high Shapley value indicates data that are valuable for pneumonia detection. Our method can serve as a framework for using data Shapley to denoise large-scale medical imaging datasets.
Neural Function Modules with Sparse Arguments: A Dynamic Approach to Integrating Information across Layers
Authors: Alex Lamb, Anirudh Goyal, Agnieszka Słowik, Michael Mozer, Philippe Beaudoin, Yoshua Bengio
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

Feed-forward neural networks consist of a sequence of layers, in which each layer performs some processing on the information from the previous layer. A downside to this approach is that each layer (or module, as multiple modules can operate in parallel) is tasked with processing the entire hidden state, rather than a particular part of the state which is most relevant for that module. Methods which only operate on a small number of input variables are an essential part of most programming languages, and they allow for improved modularity and code re-usability. Our proposed method, Neural Function Modules (NFM), aims to introduce the same structural capability into deep learning. Most of the work in the context of feed-forward networks combining top-down and bottom-up feedback is limited to classification problems. The key contribution of our work is to combine attention, sparsity, top-down and bottom-up feedback, in a flexible algorithm which, as we show, improves the results in standard classification, out-of-domain generalization, generative modeling, and learning representations in the context of reinforcement learning.
Applicability and Challenges of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Satellite Frequency Plan Design
Authors: Juan Jose Garau Luis, Edward Crawley, Bruce Cameron
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The study and benchmarking of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) models has become a trend in many industries, including aerospace engineering and communications. Recent studies in these fields propose these kinds of models to address certain complex real-time decision-making problems in which classic approaches do not meet time requirements or fail to obtain optimal solutions. While the good performance of DRL models has been proved for specific use cases or scenarios, most studies do not discuss the compromises and generalizability of such models during real operations. In this paper we explore the tradeoffs of different elements of DRL models and how they might impact the final performance. To that end, we choose the Frequency Plan Design (FPD) problem in the context of multibeam satellite constellations as our use case and propose a DRL model to address it. We identify 6 different core elements that have a major effect in its performance: the policy, the policy optimizer, the state, action, and reward representations, and the training environment. We analyze different alternatives for each of these elements and characterize their effect. We also use multiple environments to account for different scenarios in which we vary the dimensionality or make the environment nonstationary. Our findings show that DRL is a potential method to address the FPD problem in real operations, especially because of its speed in decision-making. However, no single DRL model is able to outperform the rest in all scenarios, and the best approach for each of the 6 core elements depends on the features of the operation environment. While we agree on the potential of DRL to solve future complex problems in the aerospace industry, we also reflect on the importance of designing appropriate models and training procedures, understanding the applicability of such models, and reporting the main performance tradeoffs.
Fundamental Linear Algebra Problem of Gaussian Inference
Authors: Timothy D Barfoot
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Underlying many Bayesian inference techniques that seek to approximate the posterior as a Gaussian distribution is a fundamental linear algebra problem that must be solved for both the mean and key entries of the covariance. Even when the true posterior is not Gaussian (e.g., in the case of nonlinear measurement functions) we can use variational schemes that repeatedly solve this linear algebra problem at each iteration. In most cases, the question is not whether a solution to this problem exists, but rather how we can exploit problem-specific structure to find it efficiently. Our contribution is to clearly state the Fundamental Linear Algebra Problem of Gaussian Inference (FLAPOGI) and to provide a novel presentation (using Kronecker algebra) of the not-so-well-known result of Takahashi et al. (1973) that makes it possible to solve for key entries of the covariance matrix. We first provide a global solution and then a local version that can be implemented using local message passing amongst a collection of agents calculating in parallel. Contrary to belief propagation, our local scheme is guaranteed to converge in both the mean and desired covariance quantities to the global solution even when the underlying factor graph is loopy; in the case of synchronous updates, we provide a bound on the number of iterations required for convergence. Compared to belief propagation, this guaranteed convergence comes at the cost of additional storage, calculations, and communication links in the case of loops; however, we show how these can be automatically constructed on the fly using only local information.
Non-saturating GAN training as divergence minimization
Authors: Matt Shannon, Ben Poole, Soroosh Mariooryad, Tom Bagby, Eric Battenberg, David Kao, Daisy Stanton, RJ Skerry-Ryan
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Generative Adversarial Network

Non-saturating generative adversarial network (GAN) training is widely used and has continued to obtain groundbreaking results. However so far this approach has lacked strong theoretical justification, in contrast to alternatives such as f-GANs and Wasserstein GANs which are motivated in terms of approximate divergence minimization. In this paper we show that non-saturating GAN training does in fact approximately minimize a particular f-divergence. We develop general theoretical tools to compare and classify f-divergences and use these to show that the new f-divergence is qualitatively similar to reverse KL. These results help to explain the high sample quality but poor diversity often observed empirically when using this scheme.
Cooperative-Competitive Reinforcement Learning with History-Dependent Rewards
Authors: Keyang He, Bikramjit Banerjee, Prashant Doshi
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Consider a typical organization whose worker agents seek to collectively cooperate for its general betterment. However, each individual agent simultaneously seeks to act to secure a larger chunk than its co-workers of the annual increment in compensation, which usually comes from a {\em fixed} pot. As such, the individual agent in the organization must cooperate and compete. Another feature of many organizations is that a worker receives a bonus, which is often a fraction of previous year's total profit. As such, the agent derives a reward that is also partly dependent on historical performance. How should the individual agent decide to act in this context? Few methods for the mixed cooperative-competitive setting have been presented in recent years, but these are challenged by problem domains whose reward functions do not depend on the current state and action only. Recent deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods using long short-term memory (LSTM) may be used, but these adopt a joint perspective to the interaction or require explicit exchange of information among the agents to promote cooperation, which may not be possible under competition. In this paper, we first show that the agent's decision-making problem can be modeled as an interactive partially observable Markov decision process (I-POMDP) that captures the dynamic of a history-dependent reward. We present an interactive advantage actor-critic method (IA2C$^+$), which combines the independent advantage actor-critic network with a belief filter that maintains a belief distribution over other agents' models. Empirical results show that IA2C$^+$ learns the optimal policy faster and more robustly than several other baselines including one that uses a LSTM, even when attributed models are incorrect.