We propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based system that would automatically prescribe a hypothetical patient medication that may help the patient with their mental health-related speech disfluency, and adjust the medication and the dosages in response to zero-cost frequent measurement of the fluency of the patient. We demonstrate the components of the system: a module that detects and evaluates speech disfluency on a large dataset we built, and an RL algorithm that automatically finds good combinations of medications. To support the two modules, we collect data on the effect of psychiatric medications for speech disfluency from the literature, and build a plausible patient simulation system. We demonstrate that the RL system is, under some circumstances, able to converge to a good medication regime. We collect and label a dataset of people with possible speech disfluency and demonstrate our methods using that dataset. Our work is a proof of concept: we show that there is promise in the idea of using automatic data collection to address speech disfluency.
This work introduces a preference learning method that ensures adherence to given specifications, with an application to autonomous vehicles. Our approach incorporates the priority ordering of Signal Temporal Logic (STL) formulas describing traffic rules into a learning framework. By leveraging Parametric Weighted Signal Temporal Logic (PWSTL), we formulate the problem of safety-guaranteed preference learning based on pairwise comparisons and propose an approach to solve this learning problem. Our approach finds a feasible valuation for the weights of the given PWSTL formula such that, with these weights, preferred signals have weighted quantitative satisfaction measures greater than their non-preferred counterparts. The feasible valuation of weights given by our approach leads to a weighted STL formula that can be used in correct-and-custom-by-construction controller synthesis. We demonstrate the performance of our method with a pilot human subject study in two different simulated driving scenarios involving a stop sign and a pedestrian crossing. Our approach yields competitive results compared to existing preference learning methods in terms of capturing preferences and notably outperforms them when safety is considered.
Without well-labeled ground truth data, machine learning-based systems would not be as ubiquitous as they are today, but these systems rely on substantial amounts of correctly labeled data. Unfortunately, crowdsourced labeling is time consuming and expensive. To address the concerns of effort and tedium, we designed CAL, a novel interface to aid in data labeling. We made several key design decisions for CAL, which include preventing inapt labels from being selected, guiding users in selecting an appropriate label when they need assistance, incorporating labeling documentation into the interface, and providing an efficient means to view previous labels. We implemented a production-quality implementation of CAL and report a user-study evaluation that compares CAL to a standard spreadsheet. Key findings of our study include users using CAL reported lower cognitive load, did not increase task time, users rated CAL to be easier to use, and users preferred CAL over the spreadsheet.
Applications that deal with sensitive information may have restrictions placed on the data available to a machine learning (ML) classifier. For example, in some applications, a classifier may not have direct access to sensitive attributes, affecting its ability to produce accurate and fair decisions. This paper proposes a framework that models the trade-off between accuracy and fairness under four practical scenarios that dictate the type of data available for analysis. Prior works examine this trade-off by analyzing the outputs of a scoring function that has been trained to implicitly learn the underlying distribution of the feature vector, class label, and sensitive attribute of a dataset. In contrast, our framework directly analyzes the behavior of the optimal Bayesian classifier on this underlying distribution by constructing a discrete approximation it from the dataset itself. This approach enables us to formulate multiple convex optimization problems, which allow us to answer the question: How is the accuracy of a Bayesian classifier affected in different data restricting scenarios when constrained to be fair? Analysis is performed on a set of fairness definitions that include group and individual fairness. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework as a tool for quantifying the trade-offs among different fairness notions and their distributional dependencies.
Data augmentations are useful in closing the sim-to-real domain gap when training on synthetic data. This is because they widen the training data distribution, thus encouraging the model to generalize better to other domains. Many image augmentation techniques exist, parametrized by different settings, such as strength and probability. This leads to a large space of different possible augmentation policies. Some policies work better than others for overcoming the sim-to-real gap for specific datasets, and it is unclear why. This paper presents two different interpretable metrics that can be combined to predict how well a certain augmentation policy will work for a specific sim-to-real setting, focusing on object detection. We validate our metrics by training many models with different augmentation policies and showing a strong correlation with performance on real data. Additionally, we introduce GeneticAugment, a genetic programming method that can leverage these metrics to automatically design an augmentation policy for a specific dataset without needing to train a model.
In recent years, there has been widespread adoption of machine learning-based approaches to automate the solving of partial differential equations (PDEs). Among these approaches, Gaussian processes (GPs) and kernel methods have garnered considerable interest due to their flexibility, robust theoretical guarantees, and close ties to traditional methods. They can transform the solving of general nonlinear PDEs into solving quadratic optimization problems with nonlinear, PDE-induced constraints. However, the complexity bottleneck lies in computing with dense kernel matrices obtained from pointwise evaluations of the covariance kernel, and its \textit{partial derivatives}, a result of the PDE constraint and for which fast algorithms are scarce. The primary goal of this paper is to provide a near-linear complexity algorithm for working with such kernel matrices. We present a sparse Cholesky factorization algorithm for these matrices based on the near-sparsity of the Cholesky factor under a novel ordering of pointwise and derivative measurements. The near-sparsity is rigorously justified by directly connecting the factor to GP regression and exponential decay of basis functions in numerical homogenization. We then employ the Vecchia approximation of GPs, which is optimal in the Kullback-Leibler divergence, to compute the approximate factor. This enables us to compute $\epsilon$-approximate inverse Cholesky factors of the kernel matrices with complexity $O(N\log^d(N/\epsilon))$ in space and $O(N\log^{2d}(N/\epsilon))$ in time. We integrate sparse Cholesky factorizations into optimization algorithms to obtain fast solvers of the nonlinear PDE. We numerically illustrate our algorithm's near-linear space/time complexity for a broad class of nonlinear PDEs such as the nonlinear elliptic, Burgers, and Monge-Amp\`ere equations.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
Exploration-exploitation is a powerful and practical tool in multi-agent learning (MAL), however, its effects are far from understood. To make progress in this direction, we study a smooth analogue of Q-learning. We start by showing that our learning model has strong theoretical justification as an optimal model for studying exploration-exploitation. Specifically, we prove that smooth Q-learning has bounded regret in arbitrary games for a cost model that explicitly captures the balance between game and exploration costs and that it always converges to the set of quantal-response equilibria (QRE), the standard solution concept for games under bounded rationality, in weighted potential games with heterogeneous learning agents. In our main task, we then turn to measure the effect of exploration in collective system performance. We characterize the geometry of the QRE surface in low-dimensional MAL systems and link our findings with catastrophe (bifurcation) theory. In particular, as the exploration hyperparameter evolves over-time, the system undergoes phase transitions where the number and stability of equilibria can change radically given an infinitesimal change to the exploration parameter. Based on this, we provide a formal theoretical treatment of how tuning the exploration parameter can provably lead to equilibrium selection with both positive as well as negative (and potentially unbounded) effects to system performance.
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge acquired from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It demonstrates a clear advantage on tasks that have insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related via the shared model or optimizer. In this paper, we show that a meta-learner that explicitly relates tasks on a graph describing the relations of their output dimensions (e.g., classes) can significantly improve the performance of few-shot learning. This type of graph is usually free or cheap to obtain but has rarely been explored in previous works. We study the prototype based few-shot classification, in which a prototype is generated for each class, such that the nearest neighbor search between the prototypes produces an accurate classification. We introduce "Gated Propagation Network (GPN)", which learns to propagate messages between prototypes of different classes on the graph, so that learning the prototype of each class benefits from the data of other related classes. In GPN, an attention mechanism is used for the aggregation of messages from neighboring classes, and a gate is deployed to choose between the aggregated messages and the message from the class itself. GPN is trained on a sequence of tasks from many-shot to few-shot generated by subgraph sampling. During training, it is able to reuse and update previously achieved prototypes from the memory in a life-long learning cycle. In experiments, we change the training-test discrepancy and test task generation settings for thorough evaluations. GPN outperforms recent meta-learning methods on two benchmark datasets in all studied cases.
Deep learning has emerged as a powerful machine learning technique that learns multiple layers of representations or features of the data and produces state-of-the-art prediction results. Along with the success of deep learning in many other application domains, deep learning is also popularly used in sentiment analysis in recent years. This paper first gives an overview of deep learning and then provides a comprehensive survey of its current applications in sentiment analysis.
While existing machine learning models have achieved great success for sentiment classification, they typically do not explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction, which can lead to poor results for fine-grained analysis at the snippet level (a phrase or sentence). Factorization Machine provides a possible approach to learning element-wise interaction for recommender systems, but they are not directly applicable to our task due to the inability to model contexts and word sequences. In this work, we develop two Position-aware Factorization Machines which consider word interaction, context and position information. Such information is jointly encoded in a set of sentiment-oriented word interaction vectors. Compared to traditional word embeddings, SWI vectors explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction and simplify the parameter learning. Experimental results show that while they have comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods for document-level classification, they benefit the snippet/sentence-level sentiment analysis.