Compact binary systems emit gravitational radiation which is potentially detectable by current Earth bound detectors. Extracting these signals from the instruments' background noise is a complex problem and the computational cost of most current searches depends on the complexity of the source model. Deep learning may be capable of finding signals where current algorithms hit computational limits. Here we restrict our analysis to signals from non-spinning binary black holes and systematically test different strategies by which training data is presented to the networks. To assess the impact of the training strategies, we re-analyze the first published networks and directly compare them to an equivalent matched-filter search. We find that the deep learning algorithms can generalize low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) signals to high SNR ones but not vice versa. As such, it is not beneficial to provide high SNR signals during training, and fastest convergence is achieved when low SNR samples are provided early on. During testing we found that the networks are sometimes unable to recover any signals when a false alarm probability $<10^{-3}$ is required. We resolve this restriction by applying a modification we call unbounded Softmax replacement (USR) after training. With this alteration we find that the machine learning search retains $\geq 91.5\%$ of the sensitivity of the matched-filter search down to a false-alarm rate of 1 per month.
In this paper we introduce a new approach to discrete-time semi-Markov decision processes based on the sojourn time process. Different characterizations of discrete-time semi-Markov processes are exploited and decision processes are constructed by their means. With this new approach, the agent is allowed to consider different actions depending also on the sojourn time of the process in the current state. A numerical method based on $Q$-learning algorithms for finite horizon reinforcement learning and stochastic recursive relations is investigated. Finally, we consider two toy examples: one in which the reward depends on the sojourn-time, according to the gambler's fallacy; the other in which the environment is semi-Markov even if the reward function does not depend on the sojourn time. These are used to carry on some numerical evaluations on the previously presented $Q$-learning algorithm and on a different naive method based on deep reinforcement learning.
Machine learning and computational intelligence technologies gain more and more popularity as possible solution for issues related to the power grid. One of these issues, the power flow calculation, is an iterative method to compute the voltage magnitudes of the power grid's buses from power values. Machine learning and, especially, artificial neural networks were successfully used as surrogates for the power flow calculation. Artificial neural networks highly rely on the quality and size of the training data, but this aspect of the process is apparently often neglected in the works we found. However, since the availability of high quality historical data for power grids is limited, we propose the Correlation Sampling algorithm. We show that this approach is able to cover a larger area of the sampling space compared to different random sampling algorithms from the literature and a copula-based approach, while at the same time inter-dependencies of the inputs are taken into account, which, from the other algorithms, only the copula-based approach does.
Bayesian policy reuse (BPR) is a general policy transfer framework for selecting a source policy from an offline library by inferring the task belief based on some observation signals and a trained observation model. In this paper, we propose an improved BPR method to achieve more efficient policy transfer in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). First, most BPR algorithms use the episodic return as the observation signal that contains limited information and cannot be obtained until the end of an episode. Instead, we employ the state transition sample, which is informative and instantaneous, as the observation signal for faster and more accurate task inference. Second, BPR algorithms usually require numerous samples to estimate the probability distribution of the tabular-based observation model, which may be expensive and even infeasible to learn and maintain, especially when using the state transition sample as the signal. Hence, we propose a scalable observation model based on fitting state transition functions of source tasks from only a small number of samples, which can generalize to any signals observed in the target task. Moreover, we extend the offline-mode BPR to the continual learning setting by expanding the scalable observation model in a plug-and-play fashion, which can avoid negative transfer when faced with new unknown tasks. Experimental results show that our method can consistently facilitate faster and more efficient policy transfer.
We present a data-efficient framework for solving sequential decision-making problems which exploits the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and latent variable generative models. The framework, called GenRL, trains deep policies by introducing an action latent variable such that the feed-forward policy search can be divided into two parts: (i) training a sub-policy that outputs a distribution over the action latent variable given a state of the system, and (ii) unsupervised training of a generative model that outputs a sequence of motor actions conditioned on the latent action variable. GenRL enables safe exploration and alleviates the data-inefficiency problem as it exploits prior knowledge about valid sequences of motor actions. Moreover, we provide a set of measures for evaluation of generative models such that we are able to predict the performance of the RL policy training prior to the actual training on a physical robot. We experimentally determine the characteristics of generative models that have most influence on the performance of the final policy training on two robotics tasks: shooting a hockey puck and throwing a basketball. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that GenRL is the only method which can safely and efficiently solve the robotics tasks compared to two state-of-the-art RL methods.
Over the years, many graph problems specifically those in NP-complete are studied by a wide range of researchers. Some famous examples include graph colouring, travelling salesman problem and subgraph isomorphism. Most of these problems are typically addressed by exact algorithms, approximate algorithms and heuristics. There are however some drawback for each of these methods. Recent studies have employed learning-based frameworks such as machine learning techniques in solving these problems, given that they are useful in discovering new patterns in structured data that can be represented using graphs. This research direction has successfully attracted a considerable amount of attention. In this survey, we provide a systematic review mainly on classic graph problems in which learning-based approaches have been proposed in addressing the problems. We discuss the overview of each framework, and provide analyses based on the design and performance of the framework. Some potential research questions are also suggested. Ultimately, this survey gives a clearer insight and can be used as a stepping stone to the research community in studying problems in this field.
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.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have pushed the state-of-the art for semantic segmentation provided that a large amount of images together with pixel-wise annotations is available. Data collection is expensive and a solution to alleviate it is to use transfer learning. This reduces the amount of annotated data required for the network training but it does not get rid of this heavy processing step. We propose a method of transfer learning without annotations on the target task for datasets with redundant content and distinct pixel distributions. Our method takes advantage of the approximate content alignment of the images between two datasets when the approximation error prevents the reuse of annotation from one dataset to another. Given the annotations for only one dataset, we train a first network in a supervised manner. This network autonomously learns to generate deep data representations relevant to the semantic segmentation. Then the images in the new dataset, we train a new network to generate a deep data representation that matches the one from the first network on the previous dataset. The training consists in a regression between feature maps and does not require any annotations on the new dataset. We show that this method reaches performances similar to a classic transfer learning on the PASCAL VOC dataset with synthetic transformations.