In reinforcement learning (RL), sparse rewards can present a significant challenge. Fortunately, expert actions can be utilized to overcome this issue. However, acquiring explicit expert actions can be costly, and expert observations are often more readily available. This paper presents a new approach that uses expert observations for learning in robot manipulation tasks with sparse rewards from pixel observations. Specifically, our technique involves using expert observations as intermediate visual goals for a goal-conditioned RL agent, enabling it to complete a task by successively reaching a series of goals. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method in five challenging block construction tasks in simulation and show that when combined with two state-of-the-art agents, our approach can significantly improve their performance while requiring 4-20 times fewer expert actions during training. Moreover, our method is also superior to a hierarchical baseline.
This study investigates clustered federated learning (FL), one of the formulations of FL with non-i.i.d. data, where the devices are partitioned into clusters and each cluster optimally fits its data with a localized model. We propose a clustered FL framework that incorporates a nonconvex penalty to pairwise differences of parameters. This framework can automatically identify cluster structures without a priori knowledge of the number of clusters and the set of devices in each cluster. To implement the proposed framework, we introduce a novel clustered FL method called Fusion Penalized Federated Clustering (FPFC). Building upon the standard alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), FPFC is implemented in parallel, updates only a subset of devices at each communication round, and allows for variable workload per device. These strategies significantly reduce the communication cost while ensuring privacy, making it practical for FL. We also propose a new warmup strategy for hyperparameter tuning in FL settings and explore the asynchronous variant of FPFC (asyncFPFC). Theoretical analysis provides convergence guarantees for FPFC with general nonconvex losses and establishes the statistical convergence rate under a linear model with squared loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of FPFC over existing methods, including robustness and generalization capability.
Reward design is a fundamental, yet challenging aspect of practical reinforcement learning (RL). For simple tasks, researchers typically handcraft the reward function, e.g., using a linear combination of several reward factors. However, such reward engineering is subject to approximation bias, incurs large tuning cost, and often cannot provide the granularity required for complex tasks. To avoid these difficulties, researchers have turned to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which learns a reward function from human preferences between pairs of trajectory sequences. By leveraging preference-based reward modeling, RLHF learns complex rewards that are well aligned with human preferences, allowing RL to tackle increasingly difficult problems. Unfortunately, the applicability of RLHF is limited due to the high cost and difficulty of obtaining human preference data. In light of this cost, we investigate learning reward functions for complex tasks with less human effort; simply by ranking the importance of the reward factors. More specifically, we propose a new RL framework -- HERON, which compares trajectories using a hierarchical decision tree induced by the given ranking. These comparisons are used to train a preference-based reward model, which is then used for policy learning. We find that our framework can not only train high performing agents on a variety of difficult tasks, but also provide additional benefits such as improved sample efficiency and robustness. Our code is available at //github.com/abukharin3/HERON.
Many NLP tasks can be regarded as a selection problem from a set of options, such as classification tasks, multi-choice question answering, etc. Textual entailment (TE) has been shown as the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach to dealing with those selection problems. TE treats input texts as premises (P), options as hypotheses (H), then handles the selection problem by modeling (P, H) pairwise. Two limitations: first, the pairwise modeling is unaware of other options, which is less intuitive since humans often determine the best options by comparing competing candidates; second, the inference process of pairwise TE is time-consuming, especially when the option space is large. To deal with the two issues, this work first proposes a contextualized TE model (Context-TE) by appending other k options as the context of the current (P, H) modeling. Context-TE is able to learn more reliable decision for the H since it considers various context. Second, we speed up Context-TE by coming up with Parallel-TE, which learns the decisions of multiple options simultaneously. Parallel-TE significantly improves the inference speed while keeping comparable performance with Context-TE. Our methods are evaluated on three tasks (ultra-fine entity typing, intent detection and multi-choice QA) that are typical selection problems with different sizes of options. Experiments show our models set new SOTA performance; particularly, Parallel-TE is faster than the pairwise TE by k times in inference. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/jiangshdd/LearningToSelect.
When training powerful AI systems to perform complex tasks, it may be challenging to provide training signals which are robust to optimization. One concern is \textit{measurement tampering}, where the AI system manipulates multiple measurements to create the illusion of good results instead of achieving the desired outcome. In this work, we build four new text-based datasets to evaluate measurement tampering detection techniques on large language models. Concretely, given sets of text inputs and measurements aimed at determining if some outcome occurred, as well as a base model able to accurately predict measurements, the goal is to determine if examples where all measurements indicate the outcome occurred actually had the outcome occur, or if this was caused by measurement tampering. We demonstrate techniques that outperform simple baselines on most datasets, but don't achieve maximum performance. We believe there is significant room for improvement for both techniques and datasets, and we are excited for future work tackling measurement tampering.
Recent works usually address Dialog policy learning DPL by training a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to determine the best dialog action. However, existing works on deep RL require a large volume of agent-user interactions to achieve acceptable performance. In this paper, we propose to make full use of the plain text knowledge from the pre-trained language model to accelerate the RL agent's learning speed. Specifically, we design a dialog action-aware transformer encoder (DaTrans), which integrates a new fine-tuning procedure named masked last action task to encourage DaTrans to be dialog-aware and distils action-specific features. Then, DaTrans is further optimized in an RL setting with ongoing interactions and evolves through exploration in the dialog action space toward maximizing long-term accumulated rewards. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model are demonstrated with both simulator evaluation and human evaluation.
Security and privacy are primary concerns in IoT management. Security breaches in IoT resources, such as smart sensors, can leak sensitive data and compromise the privacy of individuals. Effective IoT management requires a comprehensive approach to prioritize access security and data privacy protection. Digital twins create virtual representations of IoT resources. Blockchain adds decentralization, transparency, and reliability to IoT systems. This research integrates digital twins and blockchain to manage access to IoT data streaming. Digital twins are used to encapsulate data access and view configurations. Access is enabled on digital twins, not on IoT resources directly. Trust structures programmed as smart contracts are the ones that manage access to digital twins. Consequently, IoT resources are not exposed to third parties, and access security breaches can be prevented. Blockchain has been used to validate digital twins and store their configuration. The research presented in this paper enables multitenant access and customization of data streaming views and abstracts the complexity of data access management. This approach provides access and configuration security and data privacy protection.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
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.
With the rapid growth of knowledge bases (KBs), question answering over knowledge base, a.k.a. KBQA has drawn huge attention in recent years. Most of the existing KBQA methods follow so called encoder-compare framework. They map the question and the KB facts to a common embedding space, in which the similarity between the question vector and the fact vectors can be conveniently computed. This, however, inevitably loses original words interaction information. To preserve more original information, we propose an attentive recurrent neural network with similarity matrix based convolutional neural network (AR-SMCNN) model, which is able to capture comprehensive hierarchical information utilizing the advantages of both RNN and CNN. We use RNN to capture semantic-level correlation by its sequential modeling nature, and use an attention mechanism to keep track of the entities and relations simultaneously. Meanwhile, we use a similarity matrix based CNN with two-directions pooling to extract literal-level words interaction matching utilizing CNNs strength of modeling spatial correlation among data. Moreover, we have developed a new heuristic extension method for entity detection, which significantly decreases the effect of noise. Our method has outperformed the state-of-the-arts on SimpleQuestion benchmark in both accuracy and efficiency.