Automating robotic surgery via learning from demonstration (LfD) techniques is extremely challenging. This is because surgical tasks often involve sequential decision-making processes with complex interactions of physical objects and have low tolerance for mistakes. Prior works assume that all demonstrations are fully observable and optimal, which might not be practical in the real world. This paper introduces a sample-efficient method that learns a robust reward function from a limited amount of ranked suboptimal demonstrations consisting of partial-view point cloud observations. The method then learns a policy by optimizing the learned reward function using reinforcement learning (RL). We show that using a learned reward function to obtain a policy is more robust than pure imitation learning. We apply our approach on a physical surgical electrocautery task and demonstrate that our method can perform well even when the provided demonstrations are suboptimal and the observations are high-dimensional point clouds. Code and videos available here: //sites.google.com/view/lfdinelectrocautery
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning (ML) approach that keeps data localized and often incorporates Differential Privacy (DP) to enhance privacy guarantees. Similar to previous work on DP in ML, we observed that differentially private federated learning (DPFL) introduces performance disparities, particularly affecting minority groups. Recent work has attempted to address performance fairness in vanilla FL through clustering, but this method remains sensitive and prone to errors, which are further exacerbated by the DP noise in DPFL. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel clustered DPFL algorithm designed to effectively identify clients' clusters in highly heterogeneous settings while maintaining high accuracy with DP guarantees. To this end, we propose to cluster clients based on both their model updates and training loss values. Our proposed approach also addresses the server's uncertainties in clustering clients' model updates by employing larger batch sizes along with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to alleviate the impact of noise and potential clustering errors, especially in privacy-sensitive scenarios. We provide theoretical analysis of the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We also extensively evaluate our approach across diverse data distributions and privacy budgets and show its effectiveness in mitigating the disparate impact of DP in FL settings with a small computational cost.
Recent work on intracranial brain-machine interfaces has demonstrated that spoken speech can be decoded with high accuracy, essentially by treating the problem as an instance of supervised learning and training deep neural networks to map from neural activity to text. However, such networks pay for their expressiveness with very large numbers of labeled data, a requirement that is particularly burdensome for invasive neural recordings acquired from human patients. On the other hand, these patients typically produce speech outside of the experimental blocks used for training decoders. Making use of such data, and data from other patients, to improve decoding would ease the burden of data collection -- especially onerous for dys- and anarthric patients. Here we demonstrate that this is possible, by reengineering wav2vec -- a simple, self-supervised, fully convolutional model that learns latent representations of audio using a noise-contrastive loss -- for electrocorticographic (ECoG) data. We train this model on unlabelled ECoG recordings, and subsequently use it to transform ECoG from labeled speech sessions into wav2vec's representation space, before finally training a supervised encoder-decoder to map these representations to text. We experiment with various numbers of labeled blocks; for almost all choices, the new representations yield superior decoding performance to the original ECoG data, and in no cases do they yield worse. Performance can also be improved in some cases by pretraining wav2vec on another patient's data. In the best cases, wav2vec's representations decrease word error rates over the original data by upwards of 50%.
Federated learning (FL) has enabled distributed learning of a model across multiple clients in a privacy-preserving manner. One of the main challenges of FL is to accommodate clients with varying hardware capacities; clients have differing compute and memory requirements. To tackle this challenge, recent state-of-the-art approaches leverage the use of early exits. Nonetheless, these approaches fall short of mitigating the challenges of joint learning multiple exit classifiers, often relying on hand-picked heuristic solutions for knowledge distillation among classifiers and/or utilizing additional layers for weaker classifiers. In this work, instead of utilizing multiple classifiers, we propose a recurrent early exit approach named ReeFL that fuses features from different sub-models into a single shared classifier. Specifically, we use a transformer-based early-exit module shared among sub-models to i) better exploit multi-layer feature representations for task-specific prediction and ii) modulate the feature representation of the backbone model for subsequent predictions. We additionally present a per-client self-distillation approach where the best sub-model is automatically selected as the teacher of the other sub-models at each client. Our experiments on standard image and speech classification benchmarks across various emerging federated fine-tuning baselines demonstrate ReeFL's effectiveness over previous works.
Entity alignment (EA) aims to merge two knowledge graphs (KGs) by identifying equivalent entity pairs. While existing methods heavily rely on human-generated labels, it is prohibitively expensive to incorporate cross-domain experts for annotation in real-world scenarios. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents new avenues for automating EA with annotations, inspired by their comprehensive capability to process semantic information. However, it is nontrivial to directly apply LLMs for EA since the annotation space in real-world KGs is large. LLMs could also generate noisy labels that may mislead the alignment. To this end, we propose a unified framework, LLM4EA, to effectively leverage LLMs for EA. Specifically, we design a novel active learning policy to significantly reduce the annotation space by prioritizing the most valuable entities based on the entire inter-KG and intra-KG structure. Moreover, we introduce an unsupervised label refiner to continuously enhance label accuracy through in-depth probabilistic reasoning. We iteratively optimize the policy based on the feedback from a base EA model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of LLM4EA on four benchmark datasets in terms of effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency.
Automated penetration testing (AutoPT) based on reinforcement learning (RL) has proven its ability to improve the efficiency of vulnerability identification in information systems. However, RL-based PT encounters several challenges, including poor sampling efficiency, intricate reward specification, and limited interpretability. To address these issues, we propose a knowledge-informed AutoPT framework called DRLRM-PT, which leverages reward machines (RMs) to encode domain knowledge as guidelines for training a PT policy. In our study, we specifically focus on lateral movement as a PT case study and formulate it as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) guided by RMs. We design two RMs based on the MITRE ATT\&CK knowledge base for lateral movement. To solve the POMDP and optimize the PT policy, we employ the deep Q-learning algorithm with RM (DQRM). The experimental results demonstrate that the DQRM agent exhibits higher training efficiency in PT compared to agents without knowledge embedding. Moreover, RMs encoding more detailed domain knowledge demonstrated better PT performance compared to RMs with simpler knowledge.
Behavioral cloning, or more broadly, learning from demonstrations (LfD) is a priomising direction for robot policy learning in complex scenarios. Albeit being straightforward to implement and data-efficient, behavioral cloning has its own drawbacks, limiting its efficacy in real robot setups. In this work, we take one step towards improving learning from demonstration algorithms by leveraging implicit energy-based policy models. Results suggest that in selected complex robot policy learning scenarios, treating supervised policy learning with an implicit model generally performs better, on average, than commonly used neural network-based explicit models, especially in the cases of approximating potentially discontinuous and multimodal functions.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
Machine learning techniques have deeply rooted in our everyday life. However, since it is knowledge- and labor-intensive to pursue good learning performance, human experts are heavily involved in every aspect of machine learning. In order to make machine learning techniques easier to apply and reduce the demand for experienced human experts, automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a hot topic with both industrial and academic interest. In this paper, we provide an up to date survey on AutoML. First, we introduce and define the AutoML problem, with inspiration from both realms of automation and machine learning. Then, we propose a general AutoML framework that not only covers most existing approaches to date but also can guide the design for new methods. Subsequently, we categorize and review the existing works from two aspects, i.e., the problem setup and the employed techniques. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of AutoML approaches and explain the reasons underneath their successful applications. We hope this survey can serve as not only an insightful guideline for AutoML beginners but also an inspiration for future research.
Recommender System (RS) is a hot area where artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be effectively applied to improve performance. Since the well-known Netflix Challenge, collaborative filtering (CF) has become the most popular and effective recommendation method. Despite their success in CF, various AI techniques still have to face the data sparsity and cold start problems. Previous works tried to solve these two problems by utilizing auxiliary information, such as social connections among users and meta-data of items. However, they process different types of information separately, leading to information loss. In this work, we propose to utilize Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), which is a natural and general representation of different types of data, to enhance CF-based recommending methods. HIN-based recommender systems face two problems: how to represent high-level semantics for recommendation and how to fuse the heterogeneous information to recommend. To address these problems, we propose to applying meta-graph to HIN-based RS and solve the information fusion problem with a "matrix factorization (MF) + factorization machine (FM)" framework. For the "MF" part, we obtain user-item similarity matrices from each meta-graph and adopt low-rank matrix approximation to get latent features for both users and items. For the "FM" part, we propose to apply FM with Group lasso (FMG) on the obtained features to simultaneously predict missing ratings and select useful meta-graphs. Experimental results on two large real-world datasets, i.e., Amazon and Yelp, show that our proposed approach is better than that of the state-of-the-art FM and other HIN-based recommending methods.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.