This work presents a new meta-heuristic approach to select the structure of polynomial NARX models for regression and classification problems. The method takes into account the complexity of the model and the contribution of each term to build parsimonious models by proposing a new cost function formulation. The robustness of the new algorithm is tested on several simulated and experimental system with different nonlinear characteristics. The obtained results show that the proposed algorithm is capable of identifying the correct model, for cases where the proper model structure is known, and determine parsimonious models for experimental data even for those systems for which traditional and contemporary methods habitually fails. The new algorithm is validated over classical methods such as the FROLS and recent randomized approaches.
Optimal control of general nonlinear systems is a central challenge in automation. Data-driven approaches to control, enabled by powerful function approximators, have recently had great success in tackling challenging robotic applications. However, such methods often obscure the structure of dynamics and control behind black-box over-parameterized representations, thus limiting our ability to understand the closed-loop behavior. This paper adopts a hybrid-system view of nonlinear modeling and control that lends an explicit hierarchical structure to the problem and breaks down complex dynamics into simpler localized units. Therefore, we consider a sequence modeling paradigm that captures the temporal structure of the data and derive an expecation-maximization (EM) algorithm that automatically decomposes nonlinear dynamics into stochastic piecewise affine dynamical systems with nonlinear boundaries. Furthermore, we show that these time-series models naturally admit a closed-loop extension that we use to extract locally linear or polynomial feedback controllers from nonlinear experts via imitation learning. Finally, we introduce a novel hybrid realtive entropy policy search (Hb-REPS) technique that incorporates the hierarchical nature of hybrid systems and optimizes a set of time-invariant local feedback controllers derived from a locally polynomial approximation of a global value function.
Lasso and Dantzig selector are standard procedures able to perform variable selection and estimation simultaneously. This paper is concerned with extending these procedures to spatial point process intensity estimation. We propose adaptive versions of these procedures, develop efficient computational methodologies and derive asymptotic results for a large class of spatial point processes under an original setting where the number of parameters, i.e. the number of spatial covariates considered, increases with the expected number of data points. Both procedures are compared theoretically, in a simulation study, and in a real data example.
In this paper we analyze, for a model of linear regression with gaussian covariates, the performance of a Bayesian estimator given by the mean of a log-concave posterior distribution with gaussian prior, in the high-dimensional limit where the number of samples and the covariates' dimension are large and proportional. Although the high-dimensional analysis of Bayesian estimators has been previously studied for Bayesian-optimal linear regression where the correct posterior is used for inference, much less is known when there is a mismatch. Here we consider a model in which the responses are corrupted by gaussian noise and are known to be generated as linear combinations of the covariates, but the distributions of the ground-truth regression coefficients and of the noise are unknown. This regression task can be rephrased as a statistical mechanics model known as the Gardner spin glass, an analogy which we exploit. Using a leave-one-out approach we characterize the mean-square error for the regression coefficients. We also derive the log-normalizing constant of the posterior. Similar models have been studied by Shcherbina and Tirozzi and by Talagrand, but our arguments are much more straightforward. An interesting consequence of our analysis is that in the quadratic loss case, the performance of the Bayesian estimator is independent of a global "temperature" hyperparameter and matches the ridge estimator: sampling and optimizing are equally good.
Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn from multiple training tasks the ability to adapt efficiently to unseen test tasks. Despite the success, existing meta-RL algorithms are known to be sensitive to the task distribution shift. When the test task distribution is different from the training task distribution, the performance may degrade significantly. To address this issue, this paper proposes Model-based Adversarial Meta-Reinforcement Learning (AdMRL), where we aim to minimize the worst-case sub-optimality gap -- the difference between the optimal return and the return that the algorithm achieves after adaptation -- across all tasks in a family of tasks, with a model-based approach. We propose a minimax objective and optimize it by alternating between learning the dynamics model on a fixed task and finding the adversarial task for the current model -- the task for which the policy induced by the model is maximally suboptimal. Assuming the family of tasks is parameterized, we derive a formula for the gradient of the suboptimality with respect to the task parameters via the implicit function theorem, and show how the gradient estimator can be efficiently implemented by the conjugate gradient method and a novel use of the REINFORCE estimator. We evaluate our approach on several continuous control benchmarks and demonstrate its efficacy in the worst-case performance over all tasks, the generalization power to out-of-distribution tasks, and in training and test time sample efficiency, over existing state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms.
Training the generative models with minimal corpus is one of the critical challenges for building open-domain dialogue systems. Existing methods tend to use the meta-learning framework which pre-trains the parameters on all non-target tasks then fine-tunes on the target task. However, fine-tuning distinguishes tasks from the parameter perspective but ignores the model-structure perspective, resulting in similar dialogue models for different tasks. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that can customize a unique dialogue model for each task in the few-shot setting. In our approach, each dialogue model consists of a shared module, a gating module, and a private module. The first two modules are shared among all the tasks, while the third one will differentiate into different network structures to better capture the characteristics of the corresponding task. The extensive experiments on two datasets show that our method outperforms all the baselines in terms of task consistency, response quality, and diversity.
Meta learning is a promising solution to few-shot learning problems. However, existing meta learning methods are restricted to the scenarios where training and application tasks share the same out-put structure. To obtain a meta model applicable to the tasks with new structures, it is required to collect new training data and repeat the time-consuming meta training procedure. This makes them inefficient or even inapplicable in learning to solve heterogeneous few-shot learning tasks. We thus develop a novel and principled HierarchicalMeta Learning (HML) method. Different from existing methods that only focus on optimizing the adaptability of a meta model to similar tasks, HML also explicitly optimizes its generalizability across heterogeneous tasks. To this end, HML first factorizes a set of similar training tasks into heterogeneous ones and trains the meta model over them at two levels to maximize adaptation and generalization performance respectively. The resultant model can then directly generalize to new tasks. Extensive experiments on few-shot classification and regression problems clearly demonstrate the superiority of HML over fine-tuning and state-of-the-art meta learning approaches in terms of generalization across heterogeneous tasks.
In information retrieval (IR) and related tasks, term weighting approaches typically consider the frequency of the term in the document and in the collection in order to compute a score reflecting the importance of the term for the document. In tasks characterized by the presence of training data (such as text classification) it seems logical that the term weighting function should take into account the distribution (as estimated from training data) of the term across the classes of interest. Although `supervised term weighting' approaches that use this intuition have been described before, they have failed to show consistent improvements. In this article we analyse the possible reasons for this failure, and call consolidated assumptions into question. Following this criticism we propose a novel supervised term weighting approach that, instead of relying on any predefined formula, learns a term weighting function optimised on the training set of interest; we dub this approach \emph{Learning to Weight} (LTW). The experiments that we run on several well-known benchmarks, and using different learning methods, show that our method outperforms previous term weighting approaches in text classification.
Model-based methods for recommender systems have been studied extensively in recent years. In systems with large corpus, however, the calculation cost for the learnt model to predict all user-item preferences is tremendous, which makes full corpus retrieval extremely difficult. To overcome the calculation barriers, models such as matrix factorization resort to inner product form (i.e., model user-item preference as the inner product of user, item latent factors) and indexes to facilitate efficient approximate k-nearest neighbor searches. However, it still remains challenging to incorporate more expressive interaction forms between user and item features, e.g., interactions through deep neural networks, because of the calculation cost. In this paper, we focus on the problem of introducing arbitrary advanced models to recommender systems with large corpus. We propose a novel tree-based method which can provide logarithmic complexity w.r.t. corpus size even with more expressive models such as deep neural networks. Our main idea is to predict user interests from coarse to fine by traversing tree nodes in a top-down fashion and making decisions for each user-node pair. We also show that the tree structure can be jointly learnt towards better compatibility with users' interest distribution and hence facilitate both training and prediction. Experimental evaluations with two large-scale real-world datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms traditional methods. Online A/B test results in Taobao display advertising platform also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in production environments.
Although reinforcement learning methods can achieve impressive results in simulation, the real world presents two major challenges: generating samples is exceedingly expensive, and unexpected perturbations can cause proficient but narrowly-learned policies to fail at test time. In this work, we propose to learn how to quickly and effectively adapt online to new situations as well as to perturbations. To enable sample-efficient meta-learning, we consider learning online adaptation in the context of model-based reinforcement learning. Our approach trains a global model such that, when combined with recent data, the model can be be rapidly adapted to the local context. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach can enable simulated agents to adapt their behavior online to novel terrains, to a crippled leg, and in highly-dynamic environments.
We consider the task of learning the parameters of a {\em single} component of a mixture model, for the case when we are given {\em side information} about that component, we call this the "search problem" in mixture models. We would like to solve this with computational and sample complexity lower than solving the overall original problem, where one learns parameters of all components. Our main contributions are the development of a simple but general model for the notion of side information, and a corresponding simple matrix-based algorithm for solving the search problem in this general setting. We then specialize this model and algorithm to four common scenarios: Gaussian mixture models, LDA topic models, subspace clustering, and mixed linear regression. For each one of these we show that if (and only if) the side information is informative, we obtain parameter estimates with greater accuracy, and also improved computation complexity than existing moment based mixture model algorithms (e.g. tensor methods). We also illustrate several natural ways one can obtain such side information, for specific problem instances. Our experiments on real data sets (NY Times, Yelp, BSDS500) further demonstrate the practicality of our algorithms showing significant improvement in runtime and accuracy.