Recent advances in reinforcement-learning research have demonstrated impressive results in building algorithms that can out-perform humans in complex tasks. Nevertheless, creating reinforcement-learning systems that can build abstractions of their experience to accelerate learning in new contexts still remains an active area of research. Previous work showed that reward-predictive state abstractions fulfill this goal, but have only be applied to tabular settings. Here, we provide a clustering algorithm that enables the application of such state abstractions to deep learning settings, providing compressed representations of an agent's inputs that preserve the ability to predict sequences of reward. A convergence theorem and simulations show that the resulting reward-predictive deep network maximally compresses the agent's inputs, significantly speeding up learning in high dimensional visual control tasks. Furthermore, we present different generalization experiments and analyze under which conditions a pre-trained reward-predictive representation network can be re-used without re-training to accelerate learning -- a form of systematic out-of-distribution transfer.
Researchers are doing intensive work on satellite images due to the information it contains with the development of computer vision algorithms and the ease of accessibility to satellite images. Building segmentation of satellite images can be used for many potential applications such as city, agricultural, and communication network planning. However, since no dataset exists for every region, the model trained in a region must gain generality. In this study, we trained several models in China and post-processing work was done on the best model selected among them. These models are evaluated in the Chicago region of the INRIA dataset. As can be seen from the results, although state-of-art results in this area have not been achieved, the results are promising. We aim to present our initial experimental results of a building segmentation from satellite images in this study.
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved great success in leveraging a large amount of unlabeled data to learn a promising classifier. A popular approach is pseudo-labeling that generates pseudo labels only for those unlabeled data with high-confidence predictions. As for the low-confidence ones, existing methods often simply discard them because these unreliable pseudo labels may mislead the model. Nevertheless, we highlight that these data with low-confidence pseudo labels can be still beneficial to the training process. Specifically, although the class with the highest probability in the prediction is unreliable, we can assume that this sample is very unlikely to belong to the classes with the lowest probabilities. In this way, these data can be also very informative if we can effectively exploit these complementary labels, i.e., the classes that a sample does not belong to. Inspired by this, we propose a novel Contrastive Complementary Labeling (CCL) method that constructs a large number of reliable negative pairs based on the complementary labels and adopts contrastive learning to make use of all the unlabeled data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CCL significantly improves the performance on top of existing methods. More critically, our CCL is particularly effective under the label-scarce settings. For example, we yield an improvement of 2.43% over FixMatch on CIFAR-10 only with 40 labeled data.
Configurable software systems are employed in many important application domains. Understanding the performance of the systems under all configurations is critical to prevent potential performance issues caused by misconfiguration. However, as the number of configurations can be prohibitively large, it is not possible to measure the system performance under all configurations. Thus, a common approach is to build a prediction model from a limited measurement data to predict the performance of all configurations as scalar values. However, it has been pointed out that there are different sources of uncertainty coming from the data collection or the modeling process, which can make the scalar predictions not certainly accurate. To address this problem, we propose a Bayesian deep learning based method, namely BDLPerf, that can incorporate uncertainty into the prediction model. BDLPerf can provide both scalar predictions for configurations' performance and the corresponding confidence intervals of these scalar predictions. We also develop a novel uncertainty calibration technique to ensure the reliability of the confidence intervals generated by a Bayesian prediction model. Finally, we suggest an efficient hyperparameter tuning technique so as to train the prediction model within a reasonable amount of time whilst achieving high accuracy. Our experimental results on 10 real-world systems show that BDLPerf achieves higher accuracy than existing approaches, in both scalar performance prediction and confidence interval estimation.
Clustering is a fundamental machine learning task which has been widely studied in the literature. Classic clustering methods follow the assumption that data are represented as features in a vectorized form through various representation learning techniques. As the data become increasingly complicated and complex, the shallow (traditional) clustering methods can no longer handle the high-dimensional data type. With the huge success of deep learning, especially the deep unsupervised learning, many representation learning techniques with deep architectures have been proposed in the past decade. Recently, the concept of Deep Clustering, i.e., jointly optimizing the representation learning and clustering, has been proposed and hence attracted growing attention in the community. Motivated by the tremendous success of deep learning in clustering, one of the most fundamental machine learning tasks, and the large number of recent advances in this direction, in this paper we conduct a comprehensive survey on deep clustering by proposing a new taxonomy of different state-of-the-art approaches. We summarize the essential components of deep clustering and categorize existing methods by the ways they design interactions between deep representation learning and clustering. Moreover, this survey also provides the popular benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics and open-source implementations to clearly illustrate various experimental settings. Last but not least, we discuss the practical applications of deep clustering and suggest challenging topics deserving further investigations as future directions.
Data in Knowledge Graphs often represents part of the current state of the real world. Thus, to stay up-to-date the graph data needs to be updated frequently. To utilize information from Knowledge Graphs, many state-of-the-art machine learning approaches use embedding techniques. These techniques typically compute an embedding, i.e., vector representations of the nodes as input for the main machine learning algorithm. If a graph update occurs later on -- specifically when nodes are added or removed -- the training has to be done all over again. This is undesirable, because of the time it takes and also because downstream models which were trained with these embeddings have to be retrained if they change significantly. In this paper, we investigate embedding updates that do not require full retraining and evaluate them in combination with various embedding models on real dynamic Knowledge Graphs covering multiple use cases. We study approaches that place newly appearing nodes optimally according to local information, but notice that this does not work well. However, we find that if we continue the training of the old embedding, interleaved with epochs during which we only optimize for the added and removed parts, we obtain good results in terms of typical metrics used in link prediction. This performance is obtained much faster than with a complete retraining and hence makes it possible to maintain embeddings for dynamic Knowledge Graphs.
This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website //pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
The accurate and interpretable prediction of future events in time-series data often requires the capturing of representative patterns (or referred to as states) underpinning the observed data. To this end, most existing studies focus on the representation and recognition of states, but ignore the changing transitional relations among them. In this paper, we present evolutionary state graph, a dynamic graph structure designed to systematically represent the evolving relations (edges) among states (nodes) along time. We conduct analysis on the dynamic graphs constructed from the time-series data and show that changes on the graph structures (e.g., edges connecting certain state nodes) can inform the occurrences of events (i.e., time-series fluctuation). Inspired by this, we propose a novel graph neural network model, Evolutionary State Graph Network (EvoNet), to encode the evolutionary state graph for accurate and interpretable time-series event prediction. Specifically, Evolutionary State Graph Network models both the node-level (state-to-state) and graph-level (segment-to-segment) propagation, and captures the node-graph (state-to-segment) interactions over time. Experimental results based on five real-world datasets show that our approach not only achieves clear improvements compared with 11 baselines, but also provides more insights towards explaining the results of event predictions.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.
Attributed graph clustering is challenging as it requires joint modelling of graph structures and node attributes. Recent progress on graph convolutional networks has proved that graph convolution is effective in combining structural and content information, and several recent methods based on it have achieved promising clustering performance on some real attributed networks. However, there is limited understanding of how graph convolution affects clustering performance and how to properly use it to optimize performance for different graphs. Existing methods essentially use graph convolution of a fixed and low order that only takes into account neighbours within a few hops of each node, which underutilizes node relations and ignores the diversity of graphs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive graph convolution method for attributed graph clustering that exploits high-order graph convolution to capture global cluster structure and adaptively selects the appropriate order for different graphs. We establish the validity of our method by theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. Empirical results show that our method compares favourably with state-of-the-art methods.