We consider the problem of learning to play a repeated contextual game with unknown reward and unknown constraints functions. Such games arise in applications where each agent's action needs to belong to a feasible set, but the feasible set is a priori unknown. For example, in constrained multi-agent reinforcement learning, the constraints on the agents' policies are a function of the unknown dynamics and hence, are themselves unknown. Under kernel-based regularity assumptions on the unknown functions, we develop a no-regret, no-violation approach which exploits similarities among different reward and constraint outcomes. The no-violation property ensures that the time-averaged sum of constraint violations converges to zero as the game is repeated. We show that our algorithm, referred to as c.z.AdaNormalGP, obtains kernel-dependent regret bounds and that the cumulative constraint violations have sublinear kernel-dependent upper bounds. In addition we introduce the notion of constrained contextual coarse correlated equilibria (c.z.CCE) and show that $\epsilon$-c.z.CCEs can be approached whenever players' follow a no-regret no-violation strategy. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of c.z.AdaNormalGP on an instance of multi-agent reinforcement learning.
With increasing scale in model and dataset size, the training of deep neural networks becomes a massive computational burden. One approach to speed up the training process is Selective Backprop. For this approach, we perform a forward pass to obtain a loss value for each data point in a minibatch. The backward pass is then restricted to a subset of that minibatch, prioritizing high-loss examples. We build on this approach, but seek to improve the subset selection mechanism by choosing the (weighted) subset which best matches the mean gradient over the entire minibatch. We use the gradients w.r.t. the model's last layer as a cheap proxy, resulting in virtually no overhead in addition to the forward pass. At the same time, for our experiments we add a simple random selection baseline which has been absent from prior work. Surprisingly, we find that both the loss-based as well as the gradient-matching strategy fail to consistently outperform the random baseline.
We consider the problem of quantifying uncertainty over expected cumulative rewards in model-based reinforcement learning. In particular, we focus on characterizing the variance over values induced by a distribution over MDPs. Previous work upper bounds the posterior variance over values by solving a so-called uncertainty Bellman equation (UBE), but the over-approximation may result in inefficient exploration. We propose a new UBE whose solution converges to the true posterior variance over values and leads to lower regret in tabular exploration problems. We identify challenges to apply the UBE theory beyond tabular problems and propose a suitable approximation. Based on this approximation, we introduce a general-purpose policy optimization algorithm, Q-Uncertainty Soft Actor-Critic (QU-SAC), that can be applied for either risk-seeking or risk-averse policy optimization with minimal changes. Experiments in both online and offline RL demonstrate improved performance compared to other uncertainty estimation methods.
In statistics and machine learning, measuring the similarity between two or more datasets is important for several purposes. The performance of a predictive model on novel datasets, referred to as generalizability, critically depends on how similar the dataset used for fitting the model is to the novel datasets. Exploiting or transferring insights between similar datasets is a key aspect of meta-learning and transfer-learning. In two-sample testing, it is checked, whether the underlying (multivariate) distributions of two datasets coincide or not. Extremely many approaches for quantifying dataset similarity have been proposed in the literature. A structured overview is a crucial first step for comparisons of approaches. We examine more than 100 methods and provide a taxonomy, classifying them into ten classes, including (i) comparisons of cumulative distribution functions, density functions, or characteristic functions, (ii) methods based on multivariate ranks, (iii) discrepancy measures for distributions, (iv) graph-based methods, (v) methods based on inter-point distances, (vi) kernel-based methods, (vii) methods based on binary classification, (viii) distance and similarity measures for datasets, (ix) comparisons based on summary statistics, and (x) different testing approaches. Here, we present an extensive review of these methods. We introduce the main underlying ideas, formal definitions, and important properties.
Neuro-symbolic AI bridges the gap between purely symbolic and neural approaches to learning. This often requires maximizing the likelihood of a symbolic constraint w.r.t the neural network's output distribution. Such output distributions are typically assumed to be fully-factorized. This limits the applicability of neuro-symbolic learning to the more expressive autoregressive distributions, e.g., transformers. Under such distributions, computing the likelihood of even simple constraints is #P-hard. Instead of attempting to enforce the constraint on the entire output distribution, we propose to do so on a random, local approximation thereof. More precisely, we optimize the likelihood of the constraint under a pseudolikelihood-based approximation centered around a model sample. Our approximation is factorized, allowing the reuse of solutions to sub-problems, a main tenet for efficiently computing neuro-symbolic losses. Moreover, it is a local, high-fidelity approximation of the likelihood, exhibiting low entropy and KL-divergence around the model sample. We evaluate our approach on Sudoku and shortest-path prediction cast as autoregressive generation, and observe that we greatly improve upon the base model's ability to predict logically-consistent outputs. We also evaluate on the task of detoxifying large language models. Using a simple constraint disallowing a list of toxic words, we are able to steer the model's outputs away from toxic generations, achieving SoTA detoxification compared to previous approaches.
Accurately detecting voiced intervals in speech signals is a critical step in pitch tracking and has numerous applications. While conventional signal processing methods and deep learning algorithms have been proposed for this task, their need to fine-tune threshold parameters for different datasets and limited generalization restrict their utility in real-world applications. To address these challenges, this study proposes a supervised voicing detection model that leverages recorded laryngograph data. The model is based on a densely-connected convolutional recurrent neural network (DC-CRN), and trained on data with reference voicing decisions extracted from laryngograph data sets. Pretraining is also investigated to improve the generalization ability of the model. The proposed model produces robust voicing detection results, outperforming other strong baseline methods, and generalizes well to unseen datasets. The source code of the proposed model with pretraining is provided along with the list of used laryngograph datasets to facilitate further research in this area.
The recent advancements in deep learning have brought about significant changes in various aspects of people's lives. Meanwhile, these rapid developments have raised concerns about the legitimacy of the training process of deep neural networks. To protect the intellectual properties of AI developers, directly examining the training process by accessing the model parameters and training data is often prohibited for verifiers. In response to this challenge, we present zero-knowledge deep learning (zkDL), an efficient zero-knowledge proof for deep learning training. To address the long-standing challenge of verifiable computations of non-linearities in deep learning training, we introduce zkReLU, a specialized proof for the ReLU activation and its backpropagation. zkReLU turns the disadvantage of non-arithmetic relations into an advantage, leading to the creation of FAC4DNN, our specialized arithmetic circuit design for modelling neural networks. This design aggregates the proofs over different layers and training steps, without being constrained by their sequential order in the training process. With our new CUDA implementation that achieves full compatibility with the tensor structures and the aggregated proof design, zkDL enables the generation of complete and sound proofs in less than a second per batch update for an 8-layer neural network with 10M parameters and a batch size of 64, while provably ensuring the privacy of data and model parameters. To our best knowledge, we are not aware of any existing work on zero-knowledge proof of deep learning training that is scalable to million-size networks.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.
Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires quickly finding informative task-relevant experiences in both meta-training and adaptation. To address this challenge, we explicitly model an exploration policy learning problem for meta-RL, which is separated from exploitation policy learning, and introduce a novel empowerment-driven exploration objective, which aims to maximize information gain for task identification. We derive a corresponding intrinsic reward and develop a new off-policy meta-RL framework, which efficiently learns separate context-aware exploration and exploitation policies by sharing the knowledge of task inference. Experimental evaluation shows that our meta-RL method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on various sparse-reward MuJoCo locomotion tasks and more complex sparse-reward Meta-World tasks.
Aspect level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment expressed towards an aspect given a context sentence. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the syntax structure in one sentence. In this paper, we propose a novel target-dependent graph attention network (TD-GAT) for aspect level sentiment classification, which explicitly utilizes the dependency relationship among words. Using the dependency graph, it propagates sentiment features directly from the syntactic context of an aspect target. In our experiments, we show our method outperforms multiple baselines with GloVe embeddings. We also demonstrate that using BERT representations further substantially boosts the performance.
We study the problem of learning representations of entities and relations in knowledge graphs for predicting missing links. The success of such a task heavily relies on the ability of modeling and inferring the patterns of (or between) the relations. In this paper, we present a new approach for knowledge graph embedding called RotatE, which is able to model and infer various relation patterns including: symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. Specifically, the RotatE model defines each relation as a rotation from the source entity to the target entity in the complex vector space. In addition, we propose a novel self-adversarial negative sampling technique for efficiently and effectively training the RotatE model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark knowledge graphs show that the proposed RotatE model is not only scalable, but also able to infer and model various relation patterns and significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art models for link prediction.