pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Discovering Diverse Nearly Optimal Policies with Successor Features
Authors: Tom Zahavy, Brendan O'Donoghue, Andre Barreto, Volodymyr Mnih, Sebastian Flennerhag, Satinder Singh
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML Workshop URL 2021 7
Tasks: Diversity

Finding different solutions to the same problem is a key aspect of intelligence associated with creativity and adaptation to novel situations. In reinforcement learning, a set of diverse policies can be useful for exploration, transfer, hierarchy, and robustness. We propose Diverse Successive Policies, a method for discovering policies that are diverse in the space of Successor Features, while assuring that they are near optimal. We formalize the problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) where the goal is to find policies that maximize diversity, characterized by an intrinsic diversity reward, while remaining near-optimal with respect to the extrinsic reward of the MDP. We also analyze how recently proposed robustness and discrimination rewards perform and find that they are sensitive to the initialization of the procedure and may converge to sub-optimal solutions. To alleviate this, we propose new explicit diversity rewards that aim to minimize the correlation between the Successor Features of the policies in the set. We compare the different diversity mechanisms in the DeepMind Control Suite and find that the type of explicit diversity we are proposing is important to discover distinct behavior, like for example different locomotion patterns.
Reward is enough for convex MDPs
Authors: Tom Zahavy, Brendan O'Donoghue, Guillaume Desjardins, Satinder Singh
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Maximising a cumulative reward function that is Markov and stationary, i.e., defined over state-action pairs and independent of time, is sufficient to capture many kinds of goals in a Markov decision process (MDP). However, not all goals can be captured in this manner. In this paper we study convex MDPs in which goals are expressed as convex functions of the stationary distribution and show that they cannot be formulated using stationary reward functions. Convex MDPs generalize the standard reinforcement learning (RL) problem formulation to a larger framework that includes many supervised and unsupervised RL problems, such as apprenticeship learning, constrained MDPs, and so-called `pure exploration'. Our approach is to reformulate the convex MDP problem as a min-max game involving policy and cost (negative reward) `players', using Fenchel duality. We propose a meta-algorithm for solving this problem and show that it unifies many existing algorithms in the literature.
Markpainting: Adversarial Machine Learning meets Inpainting
Authors: David Khachaturov, Ilia Shumailov, Yiren Zhao, Nicolas Papernot, Ross Anderson
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Inpainting is a learned interpolation technique that is based on generative modeling and used to populate masked or missing pieces in an image; it has wide applications in picture editing and retouching. Recently, inpainting started being used for watermark removal, raising concerns. In this paper we study how to manipulate it using our markpainting technique. First, we show how an image owner with access to an inpainting model can augment their image in such a way that any attempt to edit it using that model will add arbitrary visible information. We find that we can target multiple different models simultaneously with our technique. This can be designed to reconstitute a watermark if the editor had been trying to remove it. Second, we show that our markpainting technique is transferable to models that have different architectures or were trained on different datasets, so watermarks created using it are difficult for adversaries to remove. Markpainting is novel and can be used as a manipulation alarm that becomes visible in the event of inpainting.
The Impact of Network Connectivity on Collective Learning
Authors: Michael Crosscombe, Jonathan Lawry
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In decentralised autonomous systems it is the interactions between individual agents which govern the collective behaviours of the system. These local-level interactions are themselves often governed by an underlying network structure. These networks are particularly important for collective learning and decision-making whereby agents must gather evidence from their environment and propagate this information to other agents in the system. Models for collective behaviours may often rely upon the assumption of total connectivity between agents to provide effective information sharing within the system, but this assumption may be ill-advised. In this paper we investigate the impact that the underlying network has on performance in the context of collective learning. Through simulations we study small-world networks with varying levels of connectivity and randomness and conclude that totally-connected networks result in higher average error when compared to networks with less connectivity. Furthermore, we show that networks of high regularity outperform networks with increasing levels of random connectivity.
Semi-Supervised Domain Generalization with Stochastic StyleMatch
Authors: Kaiyang Zhou, Chen Change Loy, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Semi-Supervised Domain Generalization

Ideally, visual learning algorithms should be generalizable, for dealing with any unseen domain shift when deployed in a new target environment; and data-efficient, for reducing development costs by using as little labels as possible. To this end, we study semi-supervised domain generalization (SSDG), which aims to learn a domain-generalizable model using multi-source, partially-labeled training data. We design two benchmarks that cover state-of-the-art methods developed in two related fields, i.e., domain generalization (DG) and semi-supervised learning (SSL). We find that the DG methods, which by design are unable to handle unlabeled data, perform poorly with limited labels in SSDG; the SSL methods, especially FixMatch, obtain much better results but are still far away from the basic vanilla model trained using full labels. We propose StyleMatch, a simple approach that extends FixMatch with a couple of new ingredients tailored for SSDG: 1) stochastic modeling for reducing overfitting in scarce labels, and 2) multi-view consistency learning for enhancing domain generalization. Despite the concise designs, StyleMatch achieves significant improvements in SSDG. We hope our approach and the comprehensive benchmarks can pave the way for future research on generalizable and data-efficient learning systems. The source code is released at \url{https://github.com/KaiyangZhou/ssdg-benchmark}.
TransVOS: Video Object Segmentation with Transformers
Authors: Jianbiao Mei, Mengmeng Wang, Yeneng Lin, Yi Yuan, Yong liu
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, One-shot visual object segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Video Object Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Recently, Space-Time Memory Network (STM) based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS). A crucial problem in this task is how to model the dependency both among different frames and inside every frame. However, most of these methods neglect the spatial relationships (inside each frame) and do not make full use of the temporal relationships (among different frames). In this paper, we propose a new transformer-based framework, termed TransVOS, introducing a vision transformer to fully exploit and model both the temporal and spatial relationships. Moreover, most STM-based approaches employ two separate encoders to extract features of two significant inputs, i.e., reference sets (history frames with predicted masks) and query frame (current frame), respectively, increasing the models' parameters and complexity. To slim the popular two-encoder pipeline while keeping the effectiveness, we design a single two-path feature extractor to encode the above two inputs in a unified way. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our TransVOS over state-of-the-art methods on both DAVIS and YouTube-VOS datasets.
Efficient Explanations With Relevant Sets
Authors: Yacine Izza, Alexey Ignatiev, Nina Narodytska, Martin C. Cooper, Joao Marques-Silva
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00

Recent work proposed $\delta$-relevant inputs (or sets) as a probabilistic explanation for the predictions made by a classifier on a given input. $\delta$-relevant sets are significant because they serve to relate (model-agnostic) Anchors with (model-accurate) PI- explanations, among other explanation approaches. Unfortunately, the computation of smallest size $\delta$-relevant sets is complete for ${NP}^{PP}$, rendering their computation largely infeasible in practice. This paper investigates solutions for tackling the practical limitations of $\delta$-relevant sets. First, the paper alternatively considers the computation of subset-minimal sets. Second, the paper studies concrete families of classifiers, including decision trees among others. For these cases, the paper shows that the computation of subset-minimal $\delta$-relevant sets is in NP, and can be solved with a polynomial number of calls to an NP oracle. The experimental evaluation compares the proposed approach with heuristic explainers for the concrete case of the classifiers studied in the paper, and confirms the advantage of the proposed solution over the state of the art.
A Markov Reward Process-Based Approach to Spatial Interpolation
Authors: Laurens Arp
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, Spatial Interpolation

The interpolation of spatial data can be of tremendous value in various applications, such as forecasting weather from only a few measurements of meteorological or remote sensing data. Existing methods for spatial interpolation, such as variants of kriging and spatial autoregressive models, tend to suffer from at least one of the following limitations: (a) the assumption of stationarity, (b) the assumption of isotropy, and (c) the trade-off between modelling local or global spatial interaction. Addressing these issues in this work, we propose the use of Markov reward processes (MRPs) as a spatial interpolation method, and we introduce three variants thereof: (i) a basic static discount MRP (SD-MRP), (ii) an accurate but mostly theoretical optimised MRP (O-MRP), and (iii) a transferable weight prediction MRP (WP-MRP). All variants of MRP interpolation operate locally, while also implicitly accounting for global spatial relationships in the entire system through recursion. Additionally, O-MRP and WP-MRP no longer assume stationarity and are robust to anisotropy. We evaluated our proposed methods by comparing the mean absolute errors of their interpolated grid cells to those of 7 common baselines, selected from models based on spatial autocorrelation, (spatial) regression, and deep learning. We performed detailed evaluations on two publicly available datasets (local GDP values, and COVID-19 patient trajectory data). The results from these experiments clearly show the competitive advantage of MRP interpolation, which achieved significantly lower errors than the existing methods in 23 out of 40 experimental conditions, or 35 out of 40 when including O-MRP.
Student Performance Prediction Using Dynamic Neural Models
Authors: Marina Delianidi, Konstantinos Diamantaras, George Chrysogonidis, Vasileios Nikiforidis
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

We address the problem of predicting the correctness of the student's response on the next exam question based on their previous interactions in the course of their learning and evaluation process. We model the student performance as a dynamic problem and compare the two major classes of dynamic neural architectures for its solution, namely the finite-memory Time Delay Neural Networks (TDNN) and the potentially infinite-memory Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). Since the next response is a function of the knowledge state of the student and this, in turn, is a function of their previous responses and the skills associated with the previous questions, we propose a two-part network architecture. The first part employs a dynamic neural network (either TDNN or RNN) to trace the student knowledge state. The second part applies on top of the dynamic part and it is a multi-layer feed-forward network which completes the classification task of predicting the student response based on our estimate of the student knowledge state. Both input skills and previous responses are encoded using different embeddings. Regarding the skill embeddings we tried two different initialization schemes using (a) random vectors and (b) pretrained vectors matching the textual descriptions of the skills. Our experiments show that the performance of the RNN approach is better compared to the TDNN approach in all datasets that we have used. Also, we show that our RNN architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art models in four out of five datasets. It is worth noting that the TDNN approach also outperforms the state of the art models in four out of five datasets, although it is slightly worse than our proposed RNN approach. Finally, contrary to our expectations, we find that the initialization of skill embeddings using pretrained vectors offers practically no advantage over random initialization.
Cooperative Multi-Agent Transfer Learning with Level-Adaptive Credit Assignment
Authors: Tianze Zhou, Fubiao Zhang, Kun Shao, Kai Li, Wenhan Huang, Jun Luo, Weixun Wang, Yaodong Yang, Hangyu Mao, Bin Wang, Dong Li, Wulong Liu, Jianye Hao
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Starcraft, Starcraft II, Transfer Learning

Extending transfer learning to cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently received much attention. In contrast to the single-agent setting, the coordination indispensable in cooperative MARL constrains each agent's policy. However, existing transfer methods focus exclusively on agent policy and ignores coordination knowledge. We propose a new architecture that realizes robust coordination knowledge transfer through appropriate decomposition of the overall coordination into several coordination patterns. We use a novel mixing network named level-adaptive QTransformer (LA-QTransformer) to realize agent coordination that considers credit assignment, with appropriate coordination patterns for different agents realized by a novel level-adaptive Transformer (LA-Transformer) dedicated to the transfer of coordination knowledge. In addition, we use a novel agent network named Population Invariant agent with Transformer (PIT) to realize the coordination transfer in more varieties of scenarios. Extensive experiments in StarCraft II micro-management show that LA-QTransformer together with PIT achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
CIDER: Commonsense Inference for Dialogue Explanation and Reasoning
Authors: Deepanway Ghosal, Pengfei Hong, Siqi Shen, Navonil Majumder, Rada Mihalcea, Soujanya Poria
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: SIGDIAL (ACL) 2021 7
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

Commonsense inference to understand and explain human language is a fundamental research problem in natural language processing. Explaining human conversations poses a great challenge as it requires contextual understanding, planning, inference, and several aspects of reasoning including causal, temporal, and commonsense reasoning. In this work, we introduce CIDER -- a manually curated dataset that contains dyadic dialogue explanations in the form of implicit and explicit knowledge triplets inferred using contextual commonsense inference. Extracting such rich explanations from conversations can be conducive to improving several downstream applications. The annotated triplets are categorized by the type of commonsense knowledge present (e.g., causal, conditional, temporal). We set up three different tasks conditioned on the annotated dataset: Dialogue-level Natural Language Inference, Span Extraction, and Multi-choice Span Selection. Baseline results obtained with transformer-based models reveal that the tasks are difficult, paving the way for promising future research. The dataset and the baseline implementations are publicly available at https://cider-task.github.io/cider/.
A Unified Cognitive Learning Framework for Adapting to Dynamic Environment and Tasks
Authors: Qihui Wu, Tianchen Ruan, Fuhui Zhou, Yang Huang, Fan Xu, Shijin Zhao, Ya Liu, Xuyang Huang
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Learning

Many machine learning frameworks have been proposed and used in wireless communications for realizing diverse goals. However, their incapability of adapting to the dynamic wireless environment and tasks and of self-learning limit their extensive applications and achievable performance. Inspired by the great flexibility and adaptation of primate behaviors due to the brain cognitive mechanism, a unified cognitive learning (CL) framework is proposed for the dynamic wireless environment and tasks. The mathematical framework for our proposed CL is established. Using the public and authoritative dataset, we demonstrate that our proposed CL framework has three advantages, namely, the capability of adapting to the dynamic environment and tasks, the self-learning capability and the capability of 'good money driving out bad money' by taking modulation recognition as an example. The proposed CL framework can enrich the current learning frameworks and widen the applications.
Omnizart: A General Toolbox for Automatic Music Transcription
Authors: Yu-Te Wu, Yin-Jyun Luo, Tsung-Ping Chen, I-Chieh Wei, Jui-Yang Hsu, Yi-Chin Chuang, Li Su
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Chord Recognition, Downbeat Tracking, Information Retrieval, Music Information Retrieval, Music Transcription, Retrieval

We present and release Omnizart, a new Python library that provides a streamlined solution to automatic music transcription (AMT). Omnizart encompasses modules that construct the life-cycle of deep learning-based AMT, and is designed for ease of use with a compact command-line interface. To the best of our knowledge, Omnizart is the first transcription toolkit which offers models covering a wide class of instruments ranging from solo, instrument ensembles, percussion instruments to vocal, as well as models for chord recognition and beat/downbeat tracking, two music information retrieval (MIR) tasks highly related to AMT.
To trust or not to trust an explanation: using LEAF to evaluate local linear XAI methods
Authors: Elvio G. Amparore, Alan Perotti, Paolo Bajardi
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

The main objective of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is to provide effective explanations for black-box classifiers. The existing literature lists many desirable properties for explanations to be useful, but there is no consensus on how to quantitatively evaluate explanations in practice. Moreover, explanations are typically used only to inspect black-box models, and the proactive use of explanations as a decision support is generally overlooked. Among the many approaches to XAI, a widely adopted paradigm is Local Linear Explanations - with LIME and SHAP emerging as state-of-the-art methods. We show that these methods are plagued by many defects including unstable explanations, divergence of actual implementations from the promised theoretical properties, and explanations for the wrong label. This highlights the need to have standard and unbiased evaluation procedures for Local Linear Explanations in the XAI field. In this paper we address the problem of identifying a clear and unambiguous set of metrics for the evaluation of Local Linear Explanations. This set includes both existing and novel metrics defined specifically for this class of explanations. All metrics have been included in an open Python framework, named LEAF. The purpose of LEAF is to provide a reference for end users to evaluate explanations in a standardised and unbiased way, and to guide researchers towards developing improved explainable techniques.
KGPool: Dynamic Knowledge Graph Context Selection for Relation Extraction
Authors: Abhishek Nadgeri, Anson Bastos, Kuldeep Singh, Isaiah Onando Mulang', Johannes Hoffart, Saeedeh Shekarpour, Vijay Saraswat
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2021 8
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Relation, Relation Extraction, Relationship Extraction (Distant Supervised), Sentence

We present a novel method for relation extraction (RE) from a single sentence, mapping the sentence and two given entities to a canonical fact in a knowledge graph (KG). Especially in this presumed sentential RE setting, the context of a single sentence is often sparse. This paper introduces the KGPool method to address this sparsity, dynamically expanding the context with additional facts from the KG. It learns the representation of these facts (entity alias, entity descriptions, etc.) using neural methods, supplementing the sentential context. Unlike existing methods that statically use all expanded facts, KGPool conditions this expansion on the sentence. We study the efficacy of KGPool by evaluating it with different neural models and KGs (Wikidata and NYT Freebase). Our experimental evaluation on standard datasets shows that by feeding the KGPool representation into a Graph Neural Network, the overall method is significantly more accurate than state-of-the-art methods.
OpenBox: A Generalized Black-box Optimization Service
Authors: Yang Li, Yu Shen, Wentao Zhang, Yuanwei Chen, Huaijun Jiang, Mingchao Liu, Jiawei Jiang, Jinyang Gao, Wentao Wu, Zhi Yang, Ce Zhang, Bin Cui
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design, Transfer Learning

Black-box optimization (BBO) has a broad range of applications, including automatic machine learning, engineering, physics, and experimental design. However, it remains a challenge for users to apply BBO methods to their problems at hand with existing software packages, in terms of applicability, performance, and efficiency. In this paper, we build OpenBox, an open-source and general-purpose BBO service with improved usability. The modular design behind OpenBox also facilitates flexible abstraction and optimization of basic BBO components that are common in other existing systems. OpenBox is distributed, fault-tolerant, and scalable. To improve efficiency, OpenBox further utilizes "algorithm agnostic" parallelization and transfer learning. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of OpenBox compared to existing systems.