Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in terms of accessing and participating in the shaping of research fields. Competitions can be traced back for centuries and their achievements have had great influence in our modern world. Recently, they (re)gained popularity, with the overwhelming amounts of data that is being generated in different domains, as well as the need of pushing the barriers of existing methods, and available tools to handle such data. This chapter provides a survey of academic challenges in the context of machine learning and related fields. We review the most influential competitions in the last few years and analyze challenges per area of knowledge. The aims of scientific challenges, their goals, major achievements and expectations for the next few years are reviewed.
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In many scientific disciplines, the features of interest cannot be observed directly, so must instead be inferred from observed behaviour. Latent variable analyses are increasingly employed to systematise these inferences, and Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is perhaps the simplest and most popular of these methods. Here, we examine how the assumptions that we are prepared to entertain, about the latent variable system, mediate the likelihood that PCA-derived components will capture the true sources of variance underlying data. As expected, we find that this likelihood is excellent in the best case, and robust to empirically reasonable levels of measurement noise, but best-case performance is also: (a) not robust to violations of the method's more prominent assumptions, of linearity and orthogonality; and also (b) requires that other subtler assumptions be made, such as that the latent variables should have varying importance, and that weights relating latent variables to observed data have zero mean. Neither variance explained, nor replication in independent samples, could reliably predict which (if any) PCA-derived components will capture true sources of variance in data. We conclude by describing a procedure to fit these inferences more directly to empirical data, and use it to find that components derived via PCA from two different empirical neuropsychological datasets, are less likely to have meaningful referents in the brain than we hoped.
A fundamental challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is to learn the joint policy in an extremely large search space, which grows exponentially with the number of agents. Moreover, fully decentralized policy factorization significantly restricts the search space, which may lead to sub-optimal policies. In contrast, the auto-regressive joint policy can represent a much richer class of joint policies by factorizing the joint policy into the product of a series of conditional individual policies. While such factorization introduces the action dependency among agents explicitly in sequential execution, it does not take full advantage of the dependency during learning. In particular, the subsequent agents do not give the preceding agents feedback about their decisions. In this paper, we propose a new framework Back-Propagation Through Agents (BPTA) that directly accounts for both agents' own policy updates and the learning of their dependent counterparts. This is achieved by propagating the feedback through action chains. With the proposed framework, our Bidirectional Proximal Policy Optimisation (BPPO) outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on matrix games, StarCraftII v2, Multi-agent MuJoCo, and Google Research Football demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Recently, simplicial complexes are used in constructions of several infinite families of minimal and optimal linear codes by Hyun {\em et al.} Building upon their research, in this paper more linear codes over the ring $\mathbb{Z}_4$ are constructed by simplicial complexes. Specifically, the Lee weight distributions of the resulting quaternary codes are determined and two infinite families of four-Lee-weight quaternary codes are obtained. Compared to the databases of $\mathbb Z_4$ codes by Aydin {\em et al.}, at least nine new quaternary codes are found. Thanks to the special structure of the defining sets, we have the ability to determine whether the Gray images of certain obtained quaternary codes are linear or not. This allows us to obtain two infinite families of binary nonlinear codes and one infinite family of binary minimal linear codes. Furthermore, utilizing these minimal binary codes, some secret sharing schemes as a byproduct also are established.
Social identities play an important role in the dynamics of human societies, and it can be argued that some sense of identification with a larger cause or idea plays a critical role in making humans act responsibly. Often social activists strive to get populations to identify with some cause or notion -- like green energy, diversity, etc. in order to bring about desired social changes. We explore the problem of designing computational models for social identities in the context of autonomous AI agents. For this, we propose an agent model that enables agents to identify with certain notions and show how this affects collective outcomes. We also contrast between associations of identity with rational preferences. The proposed model is simulated in an application context of urban mobility, where we show how changes in social identity affect mobility patterns and collective outcomes.
Classical methods for quantile regression fail in cases where the quantile of interest is extreme and only few or no training data points exceed it. Asymptotic results from extreme value theory can be used to extrapolate beyond the range of the data, and several approaches exist that use linear regression, kernel methods or generalized additive models. Most of these methods break down if the predictor space has more than a few dimensions or if the regression function of extreme quantiles is complex. We propose a method for extreme quantile regression that combines the flexibility of random forests with the theory of extrapolation. Our extremal random forest (ERF) estimates the parameters of a generalized Pareto distribution, conditional on the predictor vector, by maximizing a local likelihood with weights extracted from a quantile random forest. We penalize the shape parameter in this likelihood to regularize its variability in the predictor space. Under general domain of attraction conditions, we show consistency of the estimated parameters in both the unpenalized and penalized case. Simulation studies show that our ERF outperforms both classical quantile regression methods and existing regression approaches from extreme value theory. We apply our methodology to extreme quantile prediction for U.S. wage data.
We establish finite-sample guarantees for efficient proper learning of bounded-degree polytrees, a rich class of high-dimensional probability distributions and a subclass of Bayesian networks, a widely-studied type of graphical model. Recently, Bhattacharyya et al. (2021) obtained finite-sample guarantees for recovering tree-structured Bayesian networks, i.e., 1-polytrees. We extend their results by providing an efficient algorithm which learns $d$-polytrees in polynomial time and sample complexity for any bounded $d$ when the underlying undirected graph (skeleton) is known. We complement our algorithm with an information-theoretic sample complexity lower bound, showing that the dependence on the dimension and target accuracy parameters are nearly tight.
Among semiparametric regression models, partially linear additive models provide a useful tool to include additive nonparametric components as well as a parametric component, when explaining the relationship between the response and a set of explanatory variables. This paper concerns such models under sparsity assumptions for the covariates included in the linear component. Sparse covariates are frequent in regression problems where the task of variable selection is usually of interest. As in other settings, outliers either in the residuals or in the covariates involved in the linear component have a harmful effect. To simultaneously achieve model selection for the parametric component of the model and resistance to outliers, we combine preliminary robust estimators of the additive component, robust linear $MM-$regression estimators with a penalty such as SCAD on the coefficients in the parametric part. Under mild assumptions, consistency results and rates of convergence for the proposed estimators are derived. A Monte Carlo study is carried out to compare, under different models and contamination schemes, the performance of the robust proposal with its classical counterpart. The obtained results show the advantage of using the robust approach. Through the analysis of a real data set, we also illustrate the benefits of the proposed procedure.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in representation learning on graphs and achieved state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, most existing GNNs are designed to learn node representations on the fixed and homogeneous graphs. The limitations especially become problematic when learning representations on a misspecified graph or a heterogeneous graph that consists of various types of nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose Graph Transformer Networks (GTNs) that are capable of generating new graph structures, which involve identifying useful connections between unconnected nodes on the original graph, while learning effective node representation on the new graphs in an end-to-end fashion. Graph Transformer layer, a core layer of GTNs, learns a soft selection of edge types and composite relations for generating useful multi-hop connections so-called meta-paths. Our experiments show that GTNs learn new graph structures, based on data and tasks without domain knowledge, and yield powerful node representation via convolution on the new graphs. Without domain-specific graph preprocessing, GTNs achieved the best performance in all three benchmark node classification tasks against the state-of-the-art methods that require pre-defined meta-paths from domain knowledge.
Graphical causal inference as pioneered by Judea Pearl arose from research on artificial intelligence (AI), and for a long time had little connection to the field of machine learning. This article discusses where links have been and should be established, introducing key concepts along the way. It argues that the hard open problems of machine learning and AI are intrinsically related to causality, and explains how the field is beginning to understand them.
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