Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift problem. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated policy constraints between the learned policy and the behavior policy. However, these constraints are applied equally to well-performing and inferior actions through uniform sampling, which might negatively affect the learned policy. To alleviate this issue, we propose Offline Prioritized Experience Replay (OPER), featuring a class of priority functions designed to prioritize highly-rewarding transitions, making them more frequently visited during training. Through theoretical analysis, we show that this class of priority functions induce an improved behavior policy, and when constrained to this improved policy, a policy-constrained offline RL algorithm is likely to yield a better solution. We develop two practical strategies to obtain priority weights by estimating advantages based on a fitted value network (OPER-A) or utilizing trajectory returns (OPER-R) for quick computation. OPER is a plug-and-play component for offline RL algorithms. As case studies, we evaluate OPER on five different algorithms, including BC, TD3+BC, Onestep RL, CQL, and IQL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both OPER-A and OPER-R significantly improve the performance for all baseline methods. Codes and priority weights are availiable at //github.com/sail-sg/OPER.
We present a new adaptive algorithm for learning discrete distributions under distribution drift. In this setting, we observe a sequence of independent samples from a discrete distribution that is changing over time, and the goal is to estimate the current distribution. Since we have access to only a single sample for each time step, a good estimation requires a careful choice of the number of past samples to use. To use more samples, we must resort to samples further in the past, and we incur a drift error due to the bias introduced by the change in distribution. On the other hand, if we use a small number of past samples, we incur a large statistical error as the estimation has a high variance. We present a novel adaptive algorithm that can solve this trade-off without any prior knowledge of the drift. Unlike previous adaptive results, our algorithm characterizes the statistical error using data-dependent bounds. This technicality enables us to overcome the limitations of the previous work that require a fixed finite support whose size is known in advance and that cannot change over time. Additionally, we can obtain tighter bounds depending on the complexity of the drifting distribution, and also consider distributions with infinite support.
Recent work has highlighted the label alignment property (LAP) in supervised learning, where the vector of all labels in the dataset is mostly in the span of the top few singular vectors of the data matrix. Drawing inspiration from this observation, we propose a regularization method for unsupervised domain adaptation that encourages alignment between the predictions in the target domain and its top singular vectors. Unlike conventional domain adaptation approaches that focus on regularizing representations, we instead regularize the classifier to align with the unsupervised target data, guided by the LAP in both the source and target domains. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that, under certain assumptions, our solution resides within the span of the top right singular vectors of the target domain data and aligns with the optimal solution. By removing the reliance on the commonly used optimal joint risk assumption found in classic domain adaptation theory, we showcase the effectiveness of our method on addressing problems where traditional domain adaptation methods often fall short due to high joint error. Additionally, we report improved performance over domain adaptation baselines in well-known tasks such as MNIST-USPS domain adaptation and cross-lingual sentiment analysis.
Symmetry is a fundamental aspect of many real-world robotic tasks. However, current deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches can seldom harness and exploit symmetry effectively. Often, the learned behaviors fail to achieve the desired transformation invariances and suffer from motion artifacts. For instance, a quadruped may exhibit different gaits when commanded to move forward or backward, even though it is symmetrical about its torso. This issue becomes further pronounced in high-dimensional or complex environments, where DRL methods are prone to local optima and fail to explore regions of the state space equally. Past methods on encouraging symmetry for robotic tasks have studied this topic mainly in a single-task setting, where symmetry usually refers to symmetry in the motion, such as the gait patterns. In this paper, we revisit this topic for goal-conditioned tasks in robotics, where symmetry lies mainly in task execution and not necessarily in the learned motions themselves. In particular, we investigate two approaches to incorporate symmetry invariance into DRL -- data augmentation and mirror loss function. We provide a theoretical foundation for using augmented samples in an on-policy setting. Based on this, we show that the corresponding approach achieves faster convergence and improves the learned behaviors in various challenging robotic tasks, from climbing boxes with a quadruped to dexterous manipulation.
As a general method for exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL), NoisyNet can produce problem-specific exploration strategies. Spiking neural networks (SNNs), due to their binary firing mechanism, have strong robustness to noise, making it difficult to realize efficient exploration with local disturbances. To solve this exploration problem, we propose a noisy spiking actor network (NoisySAN) that introduces time-correlated noise during charging and transmission. Moreover, a noise reduction method is proposed to find a stable policy for the agent. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of continuous control tasks from OpenAI gym.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
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.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
Learning from a few examples remains a key challenge in machine learning. Despite recent advances in important domains such as vision and language, the standard supervised deep learning paradigm does not offer a satisfactory solution for learning new concepts rapidly from little data. In this work, we employ ideas from metric learning based on deep neural features and from recent advances that augment neural networks with external memories. Our framework learns a network that maps a small labelled support set and an unlabelled example to its label, obviating the need for fine-tuning to adapt to new class types. We then define one-shot learning problems on vision (using Omniglot, ImageNet) and language tasks. Our algorithm improves one-shot accuracy on ImageNet from 87.6% to 93.2% and from 88.0% to 93.8% on Omniglot compared to competing approaches. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the same model on language modeling by introducing a one-shot task on the Penn Treebank.