Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has proven extremely useful in a large variety of application domains. However, even successful DRL-based software can exhibit highly undesirable behavior. This is due to DRL training being based on maximizing a reward function, which typically captures general trends but cannot precisely capture, or rule out, certain behaviors of the system. In this paper, we propose a novel framework aimed at drastically reducing the undesirable behavior of DRL-based software, while maintaining its excellent performance. In addition, our framework can assist in providing engineers with a comprehensible characterization of such undesirable behavior. Under the hood, our approach is based on extracting decision tree classifiers from erroneous state-action pairs, and then integrating these trees into the DRL training loop, penalizing the system whenever it performs an error. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of our approach, and use it to evaluate the technique on three significant case studies. We find that our approach can extend existing frameworks in a straightforward manner, and incurs only a slight overhead in training time. Further, it incurs only a very slight hit to performance, or even in some cases - improves it, while significantly reducing the frequency of undesirable behavior.
The cost of manual data labeling can be a significant obstacle in supervised learning. Data programming (DP) offers a weakly supervised solution for training dataset creation, wherein the outputs of user-defined programmatic labeling functions (LFs) are reconciled through unsupervised learning. However, DP can fail to outperform an unweighted majority vote in some scenarios, including low-data contexts. This work introduces a Bayesian extension of classical DP that mitigates failures of unsupervised learning by augmenting the DP objective with regularization terms. Regularized learning is achieved through maximum a posteriori estimation with informative priors. Majority vote is proposed as a proxy signal for automated prior parameter selection. Results suggest that regularized DP improves performance relative to maximum likelihood and majority voting, confers greater interpretability, and bolsters performance in low-data regimes.
While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable successes in several domains, its real-world application is limited due to many methods failing to generalise to unfamiliar conditions. In this work, we consider the problem of generalising to new transition dynamics, corresponding to cases in which the environment's response to the agent's actions differs. For example, the gravitational force exerted on a robot depends on its mass and changes the robot's mobility. Consequently, in such cases, it is necessary to condition an agent's actions on extrinsic state information and pertinent contextual information reflecting how the environment responds. While the need for context-sensitive policies has been established, the manner in which context is incorporated architecturally has received less attention. Thus, in this work, we present an investigation into how context information should be incorporated into behaviour learning to improve generalisation. To this end, we introduce a neural network architecture, the Decision Adapter, which generates the weights of an adapter module and conditions the behaviour of an agent on the context information. We show that the Decision Adapter is a useful generalisation of a previously proposed architecture and empirically demonstrate that it results in superior generalisation performance compared to previous approaches in several environments. Beyond this, the Decision Adapter is more robust to irrelevant distractor variables than several alternative methods.
While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been demonstrated effective in solving complex control tasks, sample efficiency remains a key challenge due to the large amounts of data required for remarkable performance. Existing research explores the application of representation learning for data-efficient RL, e.g., learning predictive representations by predicting long-term future states. However, many existing methods do not fully exploit the structural information inherent in sequential state signals, which can potentially improve the quality of long-term decision-making but is difficult to discern in the time domain. To tackle this problem, we propose State Sequences Prediction via Fourier Transform (SPF), a novel method that exploits the frequency domain of state sequences to extract the underlying patterns in time series data for learning expressive representations efficiently. Specifically, we theoretically analyze the existence of structural information in state sequences, which is closely related to policy performance and signal regularity, and then propose to predict the Fourier transform of infinite-step future state sequences to extract such information. One of the appealing features of SPF is that it is simple to implement while not requiring storage of infinite-step future states as prediction targets. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both sample efficiency and performance.
Vertical federated learning (VFL) enables multiple parties with disjoint features of a common user set to train a machine learning model without sharing their private data. Tree-based models have become prevalent in VFL due to their interpretability and efficiency. However, the vulnerability of tree-based VFL has not been sufficiently investigated. In this study, we first introduce a novel label inference attack, ID2Graph, which utilizes the sets of record IDs assigned to each node (i.e., instance space)to deduce private training labels. ID2Graph attack generates a graph structure from training samples, extracts communities from the graph, and clusters the local dataset using community information. To counteract label leakage from the instance space, we propose two effective defense mechanisms, Grafting-LDP, which improves the utility of label differential privacy with post-processing, and andID-LMID, which focuses on mutual information regularization. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets reveal that ID2Graph presents significant risks to tree-based models such as RandomForest and XGBoost. Further evaluations of these benchmarks demonstrate that our defense methods effectively mitigate label leakage in such instances
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) were a great step towards extending deep learning to unstructured data such as graphs. But GCNs still need a constructed graph to work with. To solve this problem, classical graphs such as $k$-nearest neighbor are usually used to initialize the GCN. Although it is computationally efficient to construct $k$-nn graphs, the constructed graph might not be very useful for learning. In a $k$-nn graph, points are restricted to have a fixed number of edges, and all edges in the graph have equal weights. We present a new way to construct the graph and initialize the GCN. It is based on random projection forest (rpForest). rpForest enables us to assign varying weights on edges indicating varying importance, which enhanced the learning. The number of trees is a hyperparameter in rpForest. We performed spectral analysis to help us setting this parameter in the right range. In the experiments, initializing the GCN using rpForest provides better results compared to $k$-nn initialization.
Federated learning allows for clients in a distributed system to jointly train a machine learning model. However, clients' models are vulnerable to attacks during the training and testing phases. In this paper, we address the issue of adversarial clients performing "internal evasion attacks": crafting evasion attacks at test time to deceive other clients. For example, adversaries may aim to deceive spam filters and recommendation systems trained with federated learning for monetary gain. The adversarial clients have extensive information about the victim model in a federated learning setting, as weight information is shared amongst clients. We are the first to characterize the transferability of such internal evasion attacks for different learning methods and analyze the trade-off between model accuracy and robustness depending on the degree of similarities in client data. We show that adversarial training defenses in the federated learning setting only display limited improvements against internal attacks. However, combining adversarial training with personalized federated learning frameworks increases relative internal attack robustness by 60% compared to federated adversarial training and performs well under limited system resources.
Offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward subject to constraints on expected cumulative cost using an existing dataset. In this paper, we propose Primal-Dual-Critic Algorithm (PDCA), a novel algorithm for offline constrained RL with general function approximation. PDCA runs a primal-dual algorithm on the Lagrangian function estimated by critics. The primal player employs a no-regret policy optimization oracle to maximize the Lagrangian estimate and the dual player acts greedily to minimize the Lagrangian estimate. We show that PDCA can successfully find a near saddle point of the Lagrangian, which is nearly optimal for the constrained RL problem. Unlike previous work that requires concentrability and a strong Bellman completeness assumption, PDCA only requires concentrability and realizability assumptions for sample-efficient learning.
In the era of deep learning, modeling for most NLP tasks has converged to several mainstream paradigms. For example, we usually adopt the sequence labeling paradigm to solve a bundle of tasks such as POS-tagging, NER, Chunking, and adopt the classification paradigm to solve tasks like sentiment analysis. With the rapid progress of pre-trained language models, recent years have observed a rising trend of Paradigm Shift, which is solving one NLP task by reformulating it as another one. Paradigm shift has achieved great success on many tasks, becoming a promising way to improve model performance. Moreover, some of these paradigms have shown great potential to unify a large number of NLP tasks, making it possible to build a single model to handle diverse tasks. In this paper, we review such phenomenon of paradigm shifts in recent years, highlighting several paradigms that have the potential to solve different NLP tasks.
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.