Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning techniques such as behavior cloning is to find a policy that achieves a higher average return than the trajectories constituting the dataset. However, we empirically find that when a dataset is dominated by suboptimal trajectories, state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms do not substantially improve over the average return of trajectories in the dataset. We argue this is due to an assumption made by current offline RL algorithms of staying close to the trajectories in the dataset. If the dataset primarily consists of sub-optimal trajectories, this assumption forces the policy to mimic the suboptimal actions. We overcome this issue by proposing a sampling strategy that enables the policy to only be constrained to ``good data" rather than all actions in the dataset (i.e., uniform sampling). We present a realization of the sampling strategy and an algorithm that can be used as a plug-and-play module in standard offline RL algorithms. Our evaluation demonstrates significant performance gains in 72 imbalanced datasets, D4RL dataset, and across three different offline RL algorithms. Code is available at //github.com/Improbable-AI/dw-offline-rl.
Federated learning (FL) is the promising privacy-preserve approach to continually update the central machine learning (ML) model (e.g., object detectors in edge servers) by aggregating the gradients obtained from local observation data in distributed connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). The incentive mechanism is to incentivize individual selfish CAVs to participate in FL towards the improvement of overall model accuracy. It is, however, challenging to design the incentive mechanism, due to the complex correlation between the overall model accuracy and unknown incentive sensitivity of CAVs, especially under the non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) data of individual CAVs. In this paper, we propose a new learn-to-incentivize algorithm to adaptively allocate rewards to individual CAVs under unknown sensitivity functions. First, we gradually learn the unknown sensitivity function of individual CAVs with accumulative observations, by using compute-efficient Gaussian process regression (GPR). Second, we iteratively update the reward allocation to individual CAVs with new sampled gradients, derived from GPR. Third, we project the updated reward allocations to comply with the total budget. We evaluate the performance of extensive simulations, where the simulation parameters are obtained from realistic profiling of the CIFAR-10 dataset and NVIDIA RTX 3080 GPU. The results show that our proposed algorithm substantially outperforms existing solutions, in terms of accuracy, scalability, and adaptability.
Continual learning has gained substantial attention within the deep learning community, offering promising solutions to the challenging problem of sequential learning. Yet, a largely unexplored facet of this paradigm is its susceptibility to adversarial attacks, especially with the aim of inducing forgetting. In this paper, we introduce "BrainWash," a novel data poisoning method tailored to impose forgetting on a continual learner. By adding the BrainWash noise to a variety of baselines, we demonstrate how a trained continual learner can be induced to forget its previously learned tasks catastrophically, even when using these continual learning baselines. An important feature of our approach is that the attacker requires no access to previous tasks' data and is armed merely with the model's current parameters and the data belonging to the most recent task. Our extensive experiments highlight the efficacy of BrainWash, showcasing degradation in performance across various regularization-based continual learning methods.
The remarkable success of deep learning has prompted interest in its application to medical diagnosis. Even tough state-of-the-art deep learning models have achieved human-level accuracy on the classification of different types of medical data, these models are hardly adopted in clinical workflows, mainly due to their lack of interpretability. The black-box-ness of deep learning models has raised the need for devising strategies to explain the decision process of these models, leading to the creation of the topic of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). In this context, we provide a thorough survey of XAI applied to medical diagnosis, including visual, textual, and example-based explanation methods. Moreover, this work reviews the existing medical imaging datasets and the existing metrics for evaluating the quality of the explanations . Complementary to most existing surveys, we include a performance comparison among a set of report generation-based methods. Finally, the major challenges in applying XAI to medical imaging are also discussed.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Deep learning has shown great potential for modeling the physical dynamics of complex particle systems such as fluids (in Lagrangian descriptions). Existing approaches, however, require the supervision of consecutive particle properties, including positions and velocities. In this paper, we consider a partially observable scenario known as fluid dynamics grounding, that is, inferring the state transitions and interactions within the fluid particle systems from sequential visual observations of the fluid surface. We propose a differentiable two-stage network named NeuroFluid. Our approach consists of (i) a particle-driven neural renderer, which involves fluid physical properties into the volume rendering function, and (ii) a particle transition model optimized to reduce the differences between the rendered and the observed images. NeuroFluid provides the first solution to unsupervised learning of particle-based fluid dynamics by training these two models jointly. It is shown to reasonably estimate the underlying physics of fluids with different initial shapes, viscosity, and densities. It is a potential alternative approach to understanding complex fluid mechanics, such as turbulence, that are difficult to model using traditional methods of mathematical physics.
Few sample learning (FSL) is significant and challenging in the field of machine learning. The capability of learning and generalizing from very few samples successfully is a noticeable demarcation separating artificial intelligence and human intelligence since humans can readily establish their cognition to novelty from just a single or a handful of examples whereas machine learning algorithms typically entail hundreds or thousands of supervised samples to guarantee generalization ability. Despite the long history dated back to the early 2000s and the widespread attention in recent years with booming deep learning technologies, little surveys or reviews for FSL are available until now. In this context, we extensively review 200+ papers of FSL spanning from the 2000s to 2019 and provide a timely and comprehensive survey for FSL. In this survey, we review the evolution history as well as the current progress on FSL, categorize FSL approaches into the generative model based and discriminative model based kinds in principle, and emphasize particularly on the meta learning based FSL approaches. We also summarize several recently emerging extensional topics of FSL and review the latest advances on these topics. Furthermore, we highlight the important FSL applications covering many research hotspots in computer vision, natural language processing, audio and speech, reinforcement learning and robotic, data analysis, etc. Finally, we conclude the survey with a discussion on promising trends in the hope of providing guidance and insights to follow-up researches.
Federated learning is a new distributed machine learning framework, where a bunch of heterogeneous clients collaboratively train a model without sharing training data. In this work, we consider a practical and ubiquitous issue in federated learning: intermittent client availability, where the set of eligible clients may change during the training process. Such an intermittent client availability model would significantly deteriorate the performance of the classical Federated Averaging algorithm (FedAvg for short). We propose a simple distributed non-convex optimization algorithm, called Federated Latest Averaging (FedLaAvg for short), which leverages the latest gradients of all clients, even when the clients are not available, to jointly update the global model in each iteration. Our theoretical analysis shows that FedLaAvg attains the convergence rate of $O(1/(N^{1/4} T^{1/2}))$, achieving a sublinear speedup with respect to the total number of clients. We implement and evaluate FedLaAvg with the CIFAR-10 dataset. The evaluation results demonstrate that FedLaAvg indeed reaches a sublinear speedup and achieves 4.23% higher test accuracy than FedAvg.
This paper surveys the machine learning literature and presents machine learning as optimization models. Such models can benefit from the advancement of numerical optimization techniques which have already played a distinctive role in several machine learning settings. Particularly, mathematical optimization models are presented for commonly used machine learning approaches for regression, classification, clustering, and deep neural networks as well new emerging applications in machine teaching and empirical model learning. The strengths and the shortcomings of these models are discussed and potential research directions are highlighted.
Graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) is an important learning problem where the goal is to assign labels to initially unlabeled nodes in a graph. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently been shown to be effective for graph-based SSL problems. GCNs inherently assume existence of pairwise relationships in the graph-structured data. However, in many real-world problems, relationships go beyond pairwise connections and hence are more complex. Hypergraphs provide a natural modeling tool to capture such complex relationships. In this work, we explore the use of GCNs for hypergraph-based SSL. In particular, we propose HyperGCN, an SSL method which uses a layer-wise propagation rule for convolutional neural networks operating directly on hypergraphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first principled adaptation of GCNs to hypergraphs. HyperGCN is able to encode both the hypergraph structure and hypernode features in an effective manner. Through detailed experimentation, we demonstrate HyperGCN's effectiveness at hypergraph-based SSL.
Deep learning has emerged as a powerful machine learning technique that learns multiple layers of representations or features of the data and produces state-of-the-art prediction results. Along with the success of deep learning in many other application domains, deep learning is also popularly used in sentiment analysis in recent years. This paper first gives an overview of deep learning and then provides a comprehensive survey of its current applications in sentiment analysis.