This paper considers a variant of zero-sum matrix games where at each timestep the row player chooses row $i$, the column player chooses column $j$, and the row player receives a noisy reward with mean $A_{i,j}$. The objective of the row player is to accumulate as much reward as possible, even against an adversarial column player. If the row player uses the EXP3 strategy, an algorithm known for obtaining $\sqrt{T}$ regret against an arbitrary sequence of rewards, it is immediate that the row player also achieves $\sqrt{T}$ regret relative to the Nash equilibrium in this game setting. However, partly motivated by the fact that the EXP3 strategy is myopic to the structure of the game, O'Donoghue et al. (2021) proposed a UCB-style algorithm that leverages the game structure and demonstrated that this algorithm greatly outperforms EXP3 empirically. While they showed that this UCB-style algorithm achieved $\sqrt{T}$ regret, in this paper we ask if there exists an algorithm that provably achieves $\text{polylog}(T)$ regret against any adversary, analogous to results from stochastic bandits. We propose a novel algorithm that answers this question in the affirmative for the simple $2 \times 2$ setting, providing the first instance-dependent guarantees for games in the regret setting. Our algorithm overcomes two major hurdles: 1) obtaining logarithmic regret even though the Nash equilibrium is estimable only at a $1/\sqrt{T}$ rate, and 2) designing row-player strategies that guarantee that either the adversary provides information about the Nash equilibrium, or the row player incurs negative regret. Moreover, in the full information case we address the general $n \times m$ case where the first hurdle is still relevant. Finally, we show that EXP3 and the UCB-based algorithm necessarily cannot perform better than $\sqrt{T}$.
The accurate calculation and uncertainty quantification of the characteristics of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) play a crucial role in ensuring the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of nuclear energy production, waste management, and nuclear safeguards. State of the art physics-based models, while reliable, are computationally intensive and time-consuming. This paper presents a surrogate modeling approach using neural networks (NN) to predict a number of SNF characteristics with reduced computational costs compared to physics-based models. An NN is trained using data generated from CASMO5 lattice calculations. The trained NN accurately predicts decay heat and nuclide concentrations of SNF, as a function of key input parameters, such as enrichment, burnup, cooling time between cycles, mean boron concentration and fuel temperature. The model is validated against physics-based decay heat simulations and measurements of different uranium oxide fuel assemblies from two different pressurized water reactors. In addition, the NN is used to perform sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification. The results are in very good alignment to CASMO5, while the computational costs (taking into account the costs of generating training samples) are reduced by a factor of 10 or more. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using NNs as surrogate models for fast characterization of SNF, providing a promising avenue for improving computational efficiency in assessing nuclear fuel behavior and associated risks.
Many players in the automotive field support scenario-based assessment of automated vehicles (AVs), where individual traffic situations can be tested and, thus, facilitate concluding on the performance of AVs in different situations. Since a large number of different scenarios can occur in real-world traffic, the question is how to find a finite set of relevant scenarios. Scenarios extracted from large real-world datasets represent real-world traffic since real driving data is used. Extracting scenarios, however, is challenging because (1) the scenarios to be tested should assess the AVs behave safely, which conflicts with the fact that the majority of the data contains scenarios that are not interesting from a safety perspective, and (2) extensive data processing is required, which hinders the utilization of large real-world datasets. In this work, we propose an approach for extracting scenarios from real-world driving data. The first step is data preprocessing to tackle the errors and noise in real-world data by reconstructing the data. The second step performs data tagging to label actors' activities, their interactions with each other and the environment. Finally, the scenarios are extracted by searching for combinations of tags. The proposed approach is evaluated using data simulated with CARLA and applied to a part of a large real-world driving dataset, i.e., the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD). The code and scenarios extracted from WOMD are open to the research community to facilitate the assessment of the automated driving functions in different scenarios.
We study the stochastic Budgeted Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where a player chooses from $K$ arms with unknown expected rewards and costs. The goal is to maximize the total reward under a budget constraint. A player thus seeks to choose the arm with the highest reward-cost ratio as often as possible. Current state-of-the-art policies for this problem have several issues, which we illustrate. To overcome them, we propose a new upper confidence bound (UCB) sampling policy, $\omega$-UCB, that uses asymmetric confidence intervals. These intervals scale with the distance between the sample mean and the bounds of a random variable, yielding a more accurate and tight estimation of the reward-cost ratio compared to our competitors. We show that our approach has logarithmic regret and consistently outperforms existing policies in synthetic and real settings.
Teaching motor skills such as playing music, handwriting, and driving, can greatly benefit from recently developed technologies such as wearable gloves for haptic feedback or robotic sensorimotor exoskeletons for the mediation of effective human-human and robot-human physical interactions. At the heart of such teacher-learner interactions still stands the critical role of the ongoing feedback a teacher can get about the student's engagement state during the learning and practice sessions. Particularly for motor learning, such feedback is an essential functionality in a system that is developed to guide a teacher on how to control the intensity of the physical interaction, and to best adapt it to the gradually evolving performance of the learner. In this paper, our focus is on the development of a near real-time machine-learning model that can acquire its input from a set of readily available, noninvasive, privacy-preserving, body-worn sensors, for the benefit of tracking the engagement of the learner in the motor task. We used the specific case of violin playing as a target domain in which data were empirically acquired, the latent construct of engagement in motor learning was carefully developed for data labeling, and a machine-learning model was rigorously trained and validated.
We present a simple yet novel parameterized form of linear mapping to achieves remarkable network compression performance: a pseudo SVD called Ternary SVD (TSVD). Unlike vanilla SVD, TSVD limits the $U$ and $V$ matrices in SVD to ternary matrices form in $\{\pm 1, 0\}$. This means that instead of using the expensive multiplication instructions, TSVD only requires addition instructions when computing $U(\cdot)$ and $V(\cdot)$. We provide direct and training transition algorithms for TSVD like Post Training Quantization and Quantization Aware Training respectively. Additionally, we analyze the convergence of the direct transition algorithms in theory. In experiments, we demonstrate that TSVD can achieve state-of-the-art network compression performance in various types of networks and tasks, including current baseline models such as ConvNext, Swim, BERT, and large language model like OPT.
The travelling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the well-studied NP-hard problems in the literature. The state-of-the art inexact TSP solvers are the Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) heuristic and Edge Assembly crossover (EAX). A recent study suggests that EAX with restart mechanisms perform well on a wide range of TSP instances. However, this study is limited to 2,000 city problems. We study for problems ranging from 2,000 to 85,900. We see that the performance of the solver varies with the type of the problem. However, combining these solvers in an ensemble setup, we are able to outperform the individual solver's performance. We see the ensemble setup as an efficient way to make use of the abundance of compute resources. In addition to EAX and LKH, we use several versions of the hybrid of EAX and Mixing Genetic Algorithm (MGA). A hybrid of MGA and EAX is known to solve some hard problems. We see that the ensemble of the hybrid version outperforms the state-of-the-art solvers on problems larger than 10,000 cities.
Financial sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in decoding market trends and guiding strategic trading decisions. Despite the deployment of advanced deep learning techniques and language models to refine sentiment analysis in finance, this study breaks new ground by investigating the potential of large language models, particularly ChatGPT 3.5, in financial sentiment analysis, with a strong emphasis on the foreign exchange market (forex). Employing a zero-shot prompting approach, we examine multiple ChatGPT prompts on a meticulously curated dataset of forex-related news headlines, measuring performance using metrics such as precision, recall, f1-score, and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of the sentiment class. Additionally, we probe the correlation between predicted sentiment and market returns as an additional evaluation approach. ChatGPT, compared to FinBERT, a well-established sentiment analysis model for financial texts, exhibited approximately 35\% enhanced performance in sentiment classification and a 36\% higher correlation with market returns. By underlining the significance of prompt engineering, particularly in zero-shot contexts, this study spotlights ChatGPT's potential to substantially boost sentiment analysis in financial applications. By sharing the utilized dataset, our intention is to stimulate further research and advancements in the field of financial services.
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) often adjust for baseline covariates in order to increase power. This technical note provides a short derivation of a simple rule of thumb for approximating the ratio of the power of an adjusted analysis to that of an unadjusted analysis. Specifically, if the unadjusted analysis is powered to approximately 80\%, then the ratio of the power of the adjusted analysis to the power of the unadjusted analysis is approximately $1 + \frac{1}{2} R^2$, where $R$ is the correlation between the baseline covariate and the outcome.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Promoting behavioural diversity is critical for solving games with non-transitive dynamics where strategic cycles exist, and there is no consistent winner (e.g., Rock-Paper-Scissors). Yet, there is a lack of rigorous treatment for defining diversity and constructing diversity-aware learning dynamics. In this work, we offer a geometric interpretation of behavioural diversity in games and introduce a novel diversity metric based on \emph{determinantal point processes} (DPP). By incorporating the diversity metric into best-response dynamics, we develop \emph{diverse fictitious play} and \emph{diverse policy-space response oracle} for solving normal-form games and open-ended games. We prove the uniqueness of the diverse best response and the convergence of our algorithms on two-player games. Importantly, we show that maximising the DPP-based diversity metric guarantees to enlarge the \emph{gamescape} -- convex polytopes spanned by agents' mixtures of strategies. To validate our diversity-aware solvers, we test on tens of games that show strong non-transitivity. Results suggest that our methods achieve much lower exploitability than state-of-the-art solvers by finding effective and diverse strategies.