The development of ethical AI systems is currently geared toward setting objective functions that align with human objectives. However, finding such functions remains a research challenge, while in RL, setting rewards by hand is a fairly standard approach. We present a methodology for dynamic value alignment, where the values that are to be aligned with are dynamically changing, using a multiple-objective approach. We apply this approach to extend Deep $Q$-Learning to accommodate multiple objectives and evaluate this method on a simplified two-leg intersection controlled by a switching agent.Our approach dynamically accommodates the preferences of drivers on the system and achieves better overall performance across three metrics (speeds, stops, and waits) while integrating objectives that have competing or conflicting actions.
Sequential neural posterior estimation (SNPE) techniques have been recently proposed for dealing with simulation-based models with intractable likelihoods. Unlike approximate Bayesian computation, SNPE techniques learn the posterior from sequential simulation using neural network-based conditional density estimators by minimizing a specific loss function. The SNPE method proposed by Lueckmann et al. (2017) used a calibration kernel to boost the sample weights around the observed data, resulting in a concentrated loss function. However, the use of calibration kernels may increase the variances of both the empirical loss and its gradient, making the training inefficient. To improve the stability of SNPE, this paper proposes to use an adaptive calibration kernel and several variance reduction techniques. The proposed method greatly speeds up the process of training, and provides a better approximation of the posterior than the original SNPE method and some existing competitors as confirmed by numerical experiments.
Missing values are unavoidable in many applications of machine learning and present challenges both during training and at test time. When variables are missing in recurring patterns, fitting separate pattern submodels have been proposed as a solution. However, fitting models independently does not make efficient use of all available data. Conversely, fitting a single shared model to the full data set relies on imputation which often leads to biased results when missingness depends on unobserved factors. We propose an alternative approach, called sharing pattern submodels, which i) makes predictions that are robust to missing values at test time, ii) maintains or improves the predictive power of pattern submodels, and iii) has a short description, enabling improved interpretability. Parameter sharing is enforced through sparsity-inducing regularization which we prove leads to consistent estimation. Finally, we give conditions for when a sharing model is optimal, even when both missingness and the target outcome depend on unobserved variables. Classification and regression experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate that our models achieve a favorable tradeoff between pattern specialization and information sharing.
When modeling scientific and industrial problems, geometries are typically modeled by explicit boundary representations obtained from computer-aided design software. Unfitted (also known as embedded or immersed) finite element methods offer a significant advantage in dealing with complex geometries, eliminating the need for generating unstructured body-fitted meshes. However, current unfitted finite elements on nonlinear geometries are restricted to implicit (possibly high-order) level set geometries. In this work, we introduce a novel automatic computational pipeline to approximate solutions of partial differential equations on domains defined by explicit nonlinear boundary representations. For the geometrical discretization, we propose a novel algorithm to generate quadratures for the bulk and surface integration on nonlinear polytopes required to compute all the terms in unfitted finite element methods. The algorithm relies on a nonlinear triangulation of the boundary, a kd-tree refinement of the surface cells that simplify the nonlinear intersections of surface and background cells to simple cases that are diffeomorphically equivalent to linear intersections, robust polynomial root-finding algorithms and surface parameterization techniques. We prove the correctness of the proposed algorithm. We have successfully applied this algorithm to simulate partial differential equations with unfitted finite elements on nonlinear domains described by computer-aided design models, demonstrating the robustness of the geometric algorithm and showing high-order accuracy of the overall method.
Neural operators have been explored as surrogate models for simulating physical systems to overcome the limitations of traditional partial differential equation (PDE) solvers. However, most existing operator learning methods assume that the data originate from a single physical mechanism, limiting their applicability and performance in more realistic scenarios. To this end, we propose Physical Invariant Attention Neural Operator (PIANO) to decipher and integrate the physical invariants (PI) for operator learning from the PDE series with various physical mechanisms. PIANO employs self-supervised learning to extract physical knowledge and attention mechanisms to integrate them into dynamic convolutional layers. Compared to existing techniques, PIANO can reduce the relative error by 13.6\%-82.2\% on PDE forecasting tasks across varying coefficients, forces, or boundary conditions. Additionally, varied downstream tasks reveal that the PI embeddings deciphered by PIANO align well with the underlying invariants in the PDE systems, verifying the physical significance of PIANO. The source code will be publicly available at: //github.com/optray/PIANO.
We consider the task of estimating functions belonging to a specific class of nonsmooth functions, namely so-called tame functions. These functions appear in a wide range of applications: training deep learning, value functions of mixed-integer programs, or wave functions of small molecules. We show that tame functions are approximable by piecewise polynomials on any full-dimensional cube. We then present the first ever mixed-integer programming formulation of piecewise polynomial regression. Together, these can be used to estimate tame functions. We demonstrate promising computational results.
The simulation of geological facies in an unobservable volume is essential in various geoscience applications. Given the complexity of the problem, deep generative learning is a promising approach to overcome the limitations of traditional geostatistical simulation models, in particular their lack of physical realism. This research aims to investigate the application of generative adversarial networks and deep variational inference for conditionally simulating meandering channels in underground volumes. In this paper, we review the generative deep learning approaches, in particular the adversarial ones and the stabilization techniques that aim to facilitate their training. The proposed approach is tested on 2D and 3D simulations generated by the stochastic process-based model Flumy. Morphological metrics are utilized to compare our proposed method with earlier iterations of generative adversarial networks. The results indicate that by utilizing recent stabilization techniques, generative adversarial networks can efficiently sample from target data distributions. Moreover, we demonstrate the ability to simulate conditioned simulations through the latent variable model property of the proposed approach.
The problem this article addresses is, given a formal specification of a system, how to produce an attack tree that correctly and clearly describes the ways the system can be attacked. Correctness means that the attacks displayed by the attack tree are indeed attacks in the system; clarity means that the tree is efficient in communicating the attack scenario. To pursue clarity, we introduce an attack-tree generation algorithm that minimises the tree size and the information length of its labels without sacrificing correctness. We achieve this by establishing a connection between the problem of factorising algebraic expressions and the problem of minimising the tree size. Notably, our generation algorithm can handle complex attacks that execute actions in parallel and sequentially. For completeness, we introduce a system model that integrates well with our generation approach, and validate the resulting framework via a running example.
Robotic capacities in object manipulation are incomparable to those of humans. Besides years of learning, humans rely heavily on the richness of information from physical interaction with the environment. In particular, tactile sensing is crucial in providing such rich feedback. Despite its potential contributions to robotic manipulation, tactile sensing is less exploited; mainly due to the complexity of the time series provided by tactile sensors. In this work, we propose a method for assessing grasp stability using tactile sensing. More specifically, we propose a methodology to extract task-relevant features and design efficient classifiers to detect object slippage with respect to individual fingertips. We compare two classification models: support vector machine and logistic regression. We use highly sensitive Uskin tactile sensors mounted on an Allegro hand to test and validate our method. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in slippage detection in an online fashion.
While the flexible capabilities of large language models (LLMs) allow them to answer a range of queries based on existing learned knowledge, information retrieval to augment generation is an important tool to allow LLMs to answer questions on information not included in pre-training data. Such private information is increasingly being generated in a wide array of distributed contexts by organizations and individuals. Performing such information retrieval using neural embeddings of queries and documents always leaked information about queries and database content unless both were stored locally. We present Private Retrieval Augmented Generation (PRAG), an approach that uses multi-party computation (MPC) to securely transmit queries to a distributed set of servers containing a privately constructed database to return top-k and approximate top-k documents. This is a first-of-its-kind approach to dense information retrieval that ensures no server observes a client's query or can see the database content. The approach introduces a novel MPC friendly protocol for inverted file approximate search (IVF) that allows for fast document search over distributed and private data in sublinear communication complexity. This work presents new avenues through which data for use in LLMs can be accessed and used without needing to centralize or forgo privacy.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.