While feedback loops are known to play important roles in many complex systems, their existence is ignored in a large part of the causal discovery literature, as systems are typically assumed to be acyclic from the outset. When applying causal discovery algorithms designed for the acyclic setting on data generated by a system that involves feedback, one would not expect to obtain correct results. In this work, we show that -- surprisingly -- the output of the Fast Causal Inference (FCI) algorithm is correct if it is applied to observational data generated by a system that involves feedback. More specifically, we prove that for observational data generated by a simple and $\sigma$-faithful Structural Causal Model (SCM), FCI is sound and complete, and can be used to consistently estimate (i) the presence and absence of causal relations, (ii) the presence and absence of direct causal relations, (iii) the absence of confounders, and (iv) the absence of specific cycles in the causal graph of the SCM. We extend these results to constraint-based causal discovery algorithms that exploit certain forms of background knowledge, including the causally sufficient setting (e.g., the PC algorithm) and the Joint Causal Inference setting (e.g., the FCI-JCI algorithm).
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Precise relative navigation is a critical enabler for distributed satellites to achieve new mission objectives impossible for a monolithic spacecraft. Carrier phase differential GPS (CDGPS) with integer ambiguity resolution (IAR) is a promising means of achieving cm-level accuracy for high-precision Rendezvous, Proximity-Operations and Docking (RPOD), In-Space Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM) as well as satellite formation flying and swarming. However, IAR is sensitive to received GPS signal noise, especially under severe multi-path or high thermal noise. This paper proposes a sensor-fusion approach to achieve IAR under such conditions in two coupling stages. A loose coupling stage fuses through an Extended Kalman Filter the CDGPS measurements with on-board sensor measurements such as range from cross-links, and vision-based bearing angles. A second tight-coupling stage augments the cost function of the integer weighted least-squares minimization with a soft constraint function using noise-weighted observed-minus-computed residuals from these external sensor measurements. Integer acceptance tests are empirically modified to reflect added constraints. Partial IAR is applied to graduate integer fixing. These proposed techniques are packaged into flight-capable software, with ground truths simulated by the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory's S3 library using state-of-the-art force modelling with relevant sources of errors, and validated in two scenarios: (1) a high multi-path scenario involving rendezvous and docking in low Earth orbit, and (2) a high thermal noise scenario relying only on GPS side-lobe signals during proximity operations in geostationary orbit. This study demonstrates successful IAR in both cases, using the proposed sensor-fusion approach, thus demonstrating potential for high-precision state estimation under adverse signal-to-noise conditions.
Query expansion is a commonly-used technique in many search systems to better represent users' information needs with additional query terms. Existing studies for this task usually propose to expand a query with retrieved or generated contextual documents. However, both types of methods have clear limitations. For retrieval-based methods, the documents retrieved with the original query might not be accurate enough to reveal the search intent, especially when the query is brief or ambiguous. For generation-based methods, existing models can hardly be trained or aligned on a particular corpus, due to the lack of corpus-specific labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel Large Language Model (LLM) based mutual verification framework for query expansion, which alleviates the aforementioned limitations. Specifically, we first design a query-query-document generation pipeline, which can effectively leverage the contextual knowledge encoded in LLMs to generate sub-queries and corresponding documents from multiple perspectives. Next, we employ a mutual verification method for both generated and retrieved contextual documents, where 1) retrieved documents are filtered with the external contextual knowledge in generated documents, and 2) generated documents are filtered with the corpus-specific knowledge in retrieved documents. Overall, the proposed method allows retrieved and generated documents to complement each other to finalize a better query expansion. We conduct extensive experiments on three information retrieval datasets, i.e., TREC-DL-2020, TREC-COVID, and MSMARCO. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms other baselines significantly.
Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to conditioning. We explore stochastic gradient algorithms as a computationally efficient method of approximately solving these linear systems: we develop low-variance optimization objectives for sampling from the posterior and extend these to inducing points. Counterintuitively, stochastic gradient descent often produces accurate predictions, even in cases where it does not converge quickly to the optimum. We explain this through a spectral characterization of the implicit bias from non-convergence. We show that stochastic gradient descent produces predictive distributions close to the true posterior both in regions with sufficient data coverage, and in regions sufficiently far away from the data. Experimentally, stochastic gradient descent achieves state-of-the-art performance on sufficiently large-scale or ill-conditioned regression tasks. Its uncertainty estimates match the performance of significantly more expensive baselines on a large-scale Bayesian~optimization~task.
Learning controllers with offline data in decision-making systems is an essential area of research due to its potential to reduce the risk of applications in real-world systems. However, in responsibility-sensitive settings such as healthcare, decision accountability is of paramount importance, yet has not been adequately addressed by the literature. This paper introduces the Accountable Offline Controller (AOC) that employs the offline dataset as the Decision Corpus and performs accountable control based on a tailored selection of examples, referred to as the Corpus Subset. AOC operates effectively in low-data scenarios, can be extended to the strictly offline imitation setting, and displays qualities of both conservation and adaptability. We assess AOC's performance in both simulated and real-world healthcare scenarios, emphasizing its capability to manage offline control tasks with high levels of performance while maintaining accountability.
As autonomous driving technology matures, end-to-end methodologies have emerged as a leading strategy, promising seamless integration from perception to control via deep learning. However, existing systems grapple with challenges such as unexpected open set environments and the complexity of black-box models. At the same time, the evolution of deep learning introduces larger, multimodal foundational models, offering multi-modal visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we harness these multimodal foundation models to enhance the robustness and adaptability of autonomous driving systems, enabling out-of-distribution, end-to-end, multimodal, and more explainable autonomy. Specifically, we present an approach to apply end-to-end open-set (any environment/scene) autonomous driving that is capable of providing driving decisions from representations queryable by image and text. To do so, we introduce a method to extract nuanced spatial (pixel/patch-aligned) features from transformers to enable the encapsulation of both spatial and semantic features. Our approach (i) demonstrates unparalleled results in diverse tests while achieving significantly greater robustness in out-of-distribution situations, and (ii) allows the incorporation of latent space simulation (via text) for improved training (data augmentation via text) and policy debugging. We encourage the reader to check our explainer video at //www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n-DJf8vXxo&feature=youtu.be and to view the code and demos on our project webpage at //drive-anywhere.github.io/.
Conversational recommender system (CRS) interacts with users through multi-turn dialogues in natural language, which aims to provide high-quality recommendations for user's instant information need. Although great efforts have been made to develop effective CRS, most of them still focus on the contextual information from the current dialogue, usually suffering from the data scarcity issue. Therefore, we consider leveraging historical dialogue data to enrich the limited contexts of the current dialogue session. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-grained hypergraph interest modeling approach to capture user interest beneath intricate historical data from different perspectives. As the core idea, we employ hypergraph to represent complicated semantic relations underlying historical dialogues. In our approach, we first employ the hypergraph structure to model users' historical dialogue sessions and form a session-based hypergraph, which captures coarse-grained, session-level relations. Second, to alleviate the issue of data scarcity, we use an external knowledge graph and construct a knowledge-based hypergraph considering fine-grained, entity-level semantics. We further conduct multi-grained hypergraph convolution on the two kinds of hypergraphs, and utilize the enhanced representations to develop interest-aware CRS. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks ReDial and TG-ReDial validate the effectiveness of our approach on both recommendation and conversation tasks. Code is available at: //github.com/RUCAIBox/MHIM.
A popular approach to streaming speech translation is to employ a single offline model with a wait-k policy to support different latency requirements, which is simpler than training multiple online models with different latency constraints. However, there is a mismatch problem in using a model trained with complete utterances for streaming inference with partial input. We demonstrate that speech representations extracted at the end of a streaming input are significantly different from those extracted from a complete utterance. To address this issue, we propose a new approach called Future-Aware Streaming Translation (FAST) that adapts an offline ST model for streaming input. FAST includes a Future-Aware Inference (FAI) strategy that incorporates future context through a trainable masked embedding, and a Future-Aware Distillation (FAD) framework that transfers future context from an approximation of full speech to streaming input. Our experiments on the MuST-C EnDe, EnEs, and EnFr benchmarks show that FAST achieves better trade-offs between translation quality and latency than strong baselines. Extensive analyses suggest that our methods effectively alleviate the aforementioned mismatch problem between offline training and online inference.
Recommendation systems have become popular and effective tools to help users discover their interesting items by modeling the user preference and item property based on implicit interactions (e.g., purchasing and clicking). Humans perceive the world by processing the modality signals (e.g., audio, text and image), which inspired researchers to build a recommender system that can understand and interpret data from different modalities. Those models could capture the hidden relations between different modalities and possibly recover the complementary information which can not be captured by a uni-modal approach and implicit interactions. The goal of this survey is to provide a comprehensive review of the recent research efforts on the multimodal recommendation. Specifically, it shows a clear pipeline with commonly used techniques in each step and classifies the models by the methods used. Additionally, a code framework has been designed that helps researchers new in this area to understand the principles and techniques, and easily runs the SOTA models. Our framework is located at: //github.com/enoche/MMRec
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing algorithms learn robust policies by modeling the disturbance and applying it to source environments during training, which usually requires prior knowledge about the disturbance and control of simulators. However, these algorithms can fail in scenarios where the disturbance from target environments is unknown or is intractable to model in simulators. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model-free actor-critic algorithm -- namely, state-conservative policy optimization (SCPO) -- to learn robust policies without modeling the disturbance in advance. Specifically, SCPO reduces the disturbance in transition dynamics to that in state space and then approximates it by a simple gradient-based regularizer. The appealing features of SCPO include that it is simple to implement and does not require additional knowledge about the disturbance or specially designed simulators. Experiments in several robot control tasks demonstrate that SCPO learns robust policies against the disturbance in transition dynamics.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
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