We study Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandit settings with large action spaces. The benchmark estimators suffer from severe bias and variance tradeoffs. Parametric approaches suffer from bias due to difficulty specifying the correct model, whereas ones with importance weight suffer from variance. To overcome these limitations, Marginalized Inverse Propensity Scoring (MIPS) was proposed to mitigate the estimator's variance via embeddings of an action. To make the estimator more accurate, we propose the doubly robust estimator of MIPS called the Marginalized Doubly Robust (MDR) estimator. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed estimator is unbiased under weaker assumptions than MIPS while maintaining variance reduction against IPS, which was the main advantage of MIPS. The empirical experiment verifies the supremacy of MDR against existing estimators.
In-Context Learning (ICL) over Large language models (LLMs) aims at solving previously unseen tasks by conditioning on a few training examples, eliminating the need for parameter updates and achieving competitive performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that factual knowledge is imperative for the performance of ICL in three core facets, i.e., the inherent knowledge learned in LLMs, the factual knowledge derived from the selected in-context examples, and the knowledge biases in LLMs for output generation. To unleash the power of LLMs in few-shot learning scenarios, we introduce a novel Knowledgeable In-Context Tuning (KICT) framework to further improve the performance of ICL: 1) injecting factual knowledge to LLMs during continual self-supervised pre-training, 2) judiciously selecting the examples with high knowledge relevance, and 3) calibrating the prediction results based on prior knowledge. We evaluate the proposed approaches on auto-regressive LLMs (e.g., GPT-style models) over multiple text classification and question answering tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that KICT substantially outperforms strong baselines, and improves by more than 13% and 7% of accuracy on text classification and question answering tasks, respectively.
The Granular Instrumental Variables (GIV) methodology exploits panels with factor error structures to construct instruments to estimate structural time series models with endogeneity even after controlling for latent factors. We extend the GIV methodology in several dimensions. First, we extend the identification procedure to a large $N$ and large $T$ framework, which depends on the asymptotic Herfindahl index of the size distribution of $N$ cross-sectional units. Second, we treat both the factors and loadings as unknown and show that the sampling error in the estimated instrument and factors is negligible when considering the limiting distribution of the structural parameters. Third, we show that the sampling error in the high-dimensional precision matrix is negligible in our estimation algorithm. Fourth, we overidentify the structural parameters with additional constructed instruments, which leads to efficiency gains. Monte Carlo evidence is presented to support our asymptotic theory and application to the global crude oil market leads to new results.
We introduce the UT Campus Object Dataset (CODa), a mobile robot egocentric perception dataset collected on the University of Texas Austin Campus. Our dataset contains 8.5 hours of multimodal sensor data: synchronized 3D point clouds and stereo RGB video from a 128-channel 3D LiDAR and two 1.25MP RGB cameras at 10 fps; RGB-D videos from an additional 0.5MP sensor at 7 fps, and a 9-DOF IMU sensor at 40 Hz. We provide 58 minutes of ground-truth annotations containing 1.3 million 3D bounding boxes with instance IDs for 53 semantic classes, 5000 frames of 3D semantic annotations for urban terrain, and pseudo-ground truth localization. We repeatedly traverse identical geographic locations for a wide range of indoor and outdoor areas, weather conditions, and times of the day. Using CODa, we empirically demonstrate that: 1) 3D object detection performance in urban settings is significantly higher when trained using CODa compared to existing datasets even when employing state-of-the-art domain adaptation approaches, 2) sensor-specific fine-tuning improves 3D object detection accuracy and 3) pretraining on CODa improves cross-dataset 3D object detection performance in urban settings compared to pretraining on AV datasets. Using our dataset and annotations, we release benchmarks for 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation using established metrics. In the future, the CODa benchmark will include additional tasks like unsupervised object discovery and re-identification. We publicly release CODa on the Texas Data Repository, pre-trained models, dataset development package, and interactive dataset viewer. We expect CODa to be a valuable dataset for research in egocentric 3D perception and planning for autonomous navigation in urban environments.
Current state-of-the-art crowd navigation approaches are mainly deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based. However, DRL-based methods suffer from the issues of generalization and scalability. To overcome these challenges, we propose a method that includes a Collision Probability (CP) in the observation space to give the robot a sense of the level of danger of the moving crowd to help the robot navigate safely through crowds with unseen behaviors. We studied the effects of changing the number of moving obstacles to pay attention during navigation. During training, we generated local waypoints to increase the reward density and improve the learning efficiency of the system. Our approach was developed using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and trained using the Gazebo simulator in a non-cooperative crowd environment with obstacles moving at randomized speeds and directions. We then evaluated our model on four different crowd-behavior scenarios. The results show that our method achieved a 100% success rate in all test settings. We compared our approach with a current state-of-the-art DRL-based approach, and our approach has performed significantly better, especially in terms of social safety. Importantly, our method can navigate in different crowd behaviors and requires no fine-tuning after being trained once. We further demonstrated the crowd navigation capability of our model in real-world tests.
Memory interference may heavily inflate task execution times in Heterogeneous Systems-on-Chips (HeSoCs). Knowing worst-case interference is consequently fundamental for supporting the correct execution of time-sensitive applications. In most of the literature, worst-case interference is assumed to be generated by, and therefore is estimated through read-intensive synthetic workloads with no caching. Yet these workloads do not always generate worst-case interference. This is the consequence of the general results reported in this work. By testing on multiple architectures, we determined that the highest interference generation traffic pattern is actually hardware dependant, and that making assumptions could lead to a severe underestimation of the worst-case (in our case, of more than 9x).
This study proposes an Ensemble Differential Evolution with Simula-tion-Based Hybridization and Self-Adaptation (EDESH-SA) approach for inven-tory management (IM) under uncertainty. In this study, DE with multiple runs is combined with a simulation-based hybridization method that includes a self-adaptive mechanism that dynamically alters mutation and crossover rates based on the success or failure of each iteration. Due to its adaptability, the algorithm is able to handle the complexity and uncertainty present in IM. Utilizing Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS), the continuous review (CR) inventory strategy is ex-amined while accounting for stochasticity and various demand scenarios. This simulation-based approach enables a realistic assessment of the proposed algo-rithm's applicability in resolving the challenges faced by IM in practical settings. The empirical findings demonstrate the potential of the proposed method to im-prove the financial performance of IM and optimize large search spaces. The study makes use of performance testing with the Ackley function and Sensitivity Analysis with Perturbations to investigate how changes in variables affect the objective value. This analysis provides valuable insights into the behavior and robustness of the algorithm.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications. Most empirical studies of GNNs directly take the observed graph as input, assuming the observed structure perfectly depicts the accurate and complete relations between nodes. However, graphs in the real world are inevitably noisy or incomplete, which could even exacerbate the quality of graph representations. In this work, we propose a novel Variational Information Bottleneck guided Graph Structure Learning framework, namely VIB-GSL, in the perspective of information theory. VIB-GSL advances the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for graph structure learning, providing a more elegant and universal framework for mining underlying task-relevant relations. VIB-GSL learns an informative and compressive graph structure to distill the actionable information for specific downstream tasks. VIB-GSL deduces a variational approximation for irregular graph data to form a tractable IB objective function, which facilitates training stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the superior effectiveness and robustness of VIB-GSL.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.