We first elucidate various fundamental properties of optimal adversarial predictors: the structure of optimal adversarial convex predictors in terms of optimal adversarial zero-one predictors, bounds relating the adversarial convex loss to the adversarial zero-one loss, and the fact that continuous predictors can get arbitrarily close to the optimal adversarial error for both convex and zero-one losses. Applying these results along with new Rademacher complexity bounds for adversarial training near initialization, we prove that for general data distributions and perturbation sets, adversarial training on shallow networks with early stopping and an idealized optimal adversary is able to achieve optimal adversarial test error. By contrast, prior theoretical work either considered specialized data distributions or only provided training error guarantees.
In this paper, we explore two fundamental first-order algorithms in convex optimization, namely, gradient descent (GD) and proximal gradient method (ProxGD). Our focus is on making these algorithms entirely adaptive by leveraging local curvature information of smooth functions. We propose adaptive versions of GD and ProxGD that are based on observed gradient differences and, thus, have no added computational costs. Moreover, we prove convergence of our methods assuming only local Lipschitzness of the gradient. In addition, the proposed versions allow for even larger stepsizes than those initially suggested in [MM20].
While sentence simplification is an active research topic in NLP, its adjacent tasks of sentence complexification and same-level paraphrasing are not. To train models on all three tasks, we present two new unsupervised datasets. We compare these datasets, one labeled by a weak classifier and the other by a rule-based approach, with a single supervised dataset. Using these three datasets for training, we perform extensive experiments on both multitasking and prompting strategies. Compared to other systems trained on unsupervised parallel data, models trained on our weak classifier labeled dataset achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ASSET simplification benchmark. Our models also outperform previous work on sentence level targeting. Finally, we establish how a handful of Large Language Models perform on these tasks under a zero-shot setting.
Over the last two decades, pseudospectral methods based on Lagrange interpolants have flourished in solving trajectory optimization problems and their flight implementations. In a seemingly unjustified departure from these highly successful methods, a new starting point for trajectory optimization is proposed. This starting point is based on the recently-developed concept of universal Birkhoff interpolants. The new approach offers a substantial computational upgrade to the Lagrange theory in completely flattening the rapid growth of the condition numbers from O(N2) to O(1), where N is the number of grid points. In addition, the Birkhoff-specific primal-dual computations are isolated to a well-conditioned linear system even for nonlinear, nonconvex problems. This is part I of a two-part paper. In part I, a new theory is developed on the basis of two hypotheses. Other than these hypotheses, the theoretical development makes no assumptions on the choices of basis functions or the selection of grid points. Several covector mapping theorems are proved to establish the mathematical equivalence between direct and indirect Birkhoff methods. In part II of this paper (with Proulx), it is shown that a select family of Gegenbauer grids satisfy the two hypotheses required for the theory to hold. Numerical examples in part II illustrate the power and utility of the new theory.
Learning a universal policy across different robot morphologies can significantly improve learning efficiency and generalization in continuous control. However, it poses a challenging multi-task reinforcement learning problem, as the optimal policy may be quite different across robots and critically depend on the morphology. Existing methods utilize graph neural networks or transformers to handle heterogeneous state and action spaces across different morphologies, but pay little attention to the dependency of a robot's control policy on its morphology context. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical architecture to better model this dependency via contextual modulation, which includes two key submodules: (1) Instead of enforcing hard parameter sharing across robots, we use hypernetworks to generate morphology-dependent control parameters; (2) We propose a fixed attention mechanism that solely depends on the morphology to modulate the interactions between different limbs in a robot. Experimental results show that our method not only improves learning performance on a diverse set of training robots, but also generalizes better to unseen morphologies in a zero-shot fashion.
Robot teleoperation gains great success in various situations, including chemical pollution rescue, disaster relief, and long-distance manipulation. In this article, we propose a virtual reality (VR) based robot teleoperation system to achieve more efficient and natural interaction with humans in different scenes. A user-friendly VR interface is designed to help users interact with a desktop scene using their hands efficiently and intuitively. To improve user experience and reduce workload, we simulate the process in the physics engine to help build a preview of the scene after manipulation in the virtual scene before execution. We conduct experiments with different users and compare our system with a direct control method across several teleoperation tasks. The user study demonstrates that the proposed system enables users to perform operations more instinctively with a lighter mental workload. Users can perform pick-and-place and object-stacking tasks in a considerably short time, even for beginners. Our code is available at //github.com/lingxiaomeng/VR_Teleoperation_Gen3.
The principle of boosting in supervised learning involves combining multiple weak classifiers to obtain a stronger classifier. AdaBoost has the reputation to be a perfect example of this approach. We have previously shown that AdaBoost is not truly an optimization algorithm. This paper shows that AdaBoost is an algorithm in name only, as the resulting combination of weak classifiers can be explicitly calculated using a truth table. This study is carried out by considering a problem with two classes and is illustrated by the particular case of three binary classifiers and presents results in comparison with those from the implementation of AdaBoost algorithm of the Python library scikit-learn.
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.
Energy efficiency and low latency are crucial requirements for designing wearable AI-empowered human activity recognition systems, due to the hard constraints of battery operations and closed-loop feedback. While neural network models have been extensively compressed to match the stringent edge requirements, spiking neural networks and event-based sensing are recently emerging as promising solutions to further improve performance due to their inherent energy efficiency and capacity to process spatiotemporal data in very low latency. This work aims to evaluate the effectiveness of spiking neural networks on neuromorphic processors in human activity recognition for wearable applications. The case of workout recognition with wrist-worn wearable motion sensors is used as a study. A multi-threshold delta modulation approach is utilized for encoding the input sensor data into spike trains to move the pipeline into the event-based approach. The spikes trains are then fed to a spiking neural network with direct-event training, and the trained model is deployed on the research neuromorphic platform from Intel, Loihi, to evaluate energy and latency efficiency. Test results show that the spike-based workouts recognition system can achieve a comparable accuracy (87.5\%) comparable to the popular milliwatt RISC-V bases multi-core processor GAP8 with a traditional neural network ( 88.1\%) while achieving two times better energy-delay product (0.66 \si{\micro\joule\second} vs. 1.32 \si{\micro\joule\second}).
Disentangled Representation Learning (DRL) aims to learn a model capable of identifying and disentangling the underlying factors hidden in the observable data in representation form. The process of separating underlying factors of variation into variables with semantic meaning benefits in learning explainable representations of data, which imitates the meaningful understanding process of humans when observing an object or relation. As a general learning strategy, DRL has demonstrated its power in improving the model explainability, controlability, robustness, as well as generalization capacity in a wide range of scenarios such as computer vision, natural language processing, data mining etc. In this article, we comprehensively review DRL from various aspects including motivations, definitions, methodologies, evaluations, applications and model designs. We discuss works on DRL based on two well-recognized definitions, i.e., Intuitive Definition and Group Theory Definition. We further categorize the methodologies for DRL into four groups, i.e., Traditional Statistical Approaches, Variational Auto-encoder Based Approaches, Generative Adversarial Networks Based Approaches, Hierarchical Approaches and Other Approaches. We also analyze principles to design different DRL models that may benefit different tasks in practical applications. Finally, we point out challenges in DRL as well as potential research directions deserving future investigations. We believe this work may provide insights for promoting the DRL research in the community.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.