We study the regret of reinforcement learning from offline data generated by a fixed behavior policy in an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process (MDP). While existing analyses of common approaches, such as fitted $Q$-iteration (FQI), suggest a $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ convergence for regret, empirical behavior exhibits \emph{much} faster convergence. In this paper, we present a finer regret analysis that exactly characterizes this phenomenon by providing fast rates for the regret convergence. First, we show that given any estimate for the optimal quality function $Q^*$, the regret of the policy it defines converges at a rate given by the exponentiation of the $Q^*$-estimate's pointwise convergence rate, thus speeding it up. The level of exponentiation depends on the level of noise in the \emph{decision-making} problem, rather than the estimation problem. We establish such noise levels for linear and tabular MDPs as examples. Second, we provide new analyses of FQI and Bellman residual minimization to establish the correct pointwise convergence guarantees. As specific cases, our results imply $O(1/n)$ regret rates in linear cases and $\exp(-\Omega(n))$ regret rates in tabular cases. We extend our findings to general function approximation by extending our results to regret guarantees based on $L_p$-convergence rates for estimating $Q^*$ rather than pointwise rates, where $L_2$ guarantees for nonparametric $Q^*$-estimation can be ensured under mild conditions.
This PhD thesis thoroughly examines the utilization of deep learning techniques as a means to advance the algorithms employed in the monitoring and optimization of electric power systems. The first major contribution of this thesis involves the application of graph neural networks to enhance power system state estimation. The second key aspect of this thesis focuses on utilizing reinforcement learning for dynamic distribution network reconfiguration. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is affirmed through extensive experimentation and simulations.
A machine learning approach is presented to accelerate the computation of block polymer morphology evolution for large domains over long timescales. The strategy exploits the separation of characteristic times between coarse-grained particle evolution on the monomer scale and slow morphological evolution over mesoscopic scales. In contrast to empirical continuum models, the proposed approach learns stochastically driven defect annihilation processes directly from particle-based simulations. A UNet architecture that respects different boundary conditions is adopted, thereby allowing periodic and fixed substrate boundary conditions of arbitrary shape. Physical concepts are also introduced via the loss function and symmetries are incorporated via data augmentation. The model is validated using three different use cases. Explainable artificial intelligence methods are applied to visualize the morphology evolution over time. This approach enables the generation of large system sizes and long trajectories to investigate defect densities and their evolution under different types of confinement. As an application, we demonstrate the importance of accessing late-stage morphologies for understanding particle diffusion inside a single block. This work has implications for directed self-assembly and materials design in micro-electronics, battery materials, and membranes.
We study the use of binary activated neural networks as interpretable and explainable predictors in the context of regression tasks on tabular data; more specifically, we provide guarantees on their expressiveness, present an approach based on the efficient computation of SHAP values for quantifying the relative importance of the features, hidden neurons and even weights. As the model's simplicity is instrumental in achieving interpretability, we propose a greedy algorithm for building compact binary activated networks. This approach doesn't need to fix an architecture for the network in advance: it is built one layer at a time, one neuron at a time, leading to predictors that aren't needlessly complex for a given task.
Model extraction emerges as a critical security threat with attack vectors exploiting both algorithmic and implementation-based approaches. The main goal of an attacker is to steal as much information as possible about a protected victim model, so that he can mimic it with a substitute model, even with a limited access to similar training data. Recently, physical attacks such as fault injection have shown worrying efficiency against the integrity and confidentiality of embedded models. We focus on embedded deep neural network models on 32-bit microcontrollers, a widespread family of hardware platforms in IoT, and the use of a standard fault injection strategy - Safe Error Attack (SEA) - to perform a model extraction attack with an adversary having a limited access to training data. Since the attack strongly depends on the input queries, we propose a black-box approach to craft a successful attack set. For a classical convolutional neural network, we successfully recover at least 90% of the most significant bits with about 1500 crafted inputs. These information enable to efficiently train a substitute model, with only 8% of the training dataset, that reaches high fidelity and near identical accuracy level than the victim model.
Data catalogs play a crucial role in modern data-driven organizations by facilitating the discovery, understanding, and utilization of diverse data assets. However, ensuring their quality and reliability is complex, especially in open and large-scale data environments. This paper proposes a framework to automatically determine the quality of open data catalogs, addressing the need for efficient and reliable quality assessment mechanisms. Our framework can analyze various core quality dimensions, such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, scalability, and timeliness, offer several alternatives for the assessment of compatibility and similarity across such catalogs as well as the implementation of a set of non-core quality dimensions such as provenance, readability, and licensing. The goal is to empower data-driven organizations to make informed decisions based on trustworthy and well-curated data assets. The source code that illustrates our approach can be downloaded from //www.github.com/jorge-martinez-gil/dataq/.
We consider a statistical problem to estimate variables (effects) that are associated with the edges of a complete bipartite graph $K_{v_1, v_2}=(V_1, V_2 \, ; E)$. Each data is obtained as a sum of selected effects, a subset of $E$. In order to estimate efficiently, we propose a design called Spanning Bipartite Block Design (SBBD). For SBBDs such that the effects are estimable, we proved that the estimators have the same variance (variance balanced). If each block (a subgraph of $K_{v_1, v_2}$) of SBBD is a semi-regular or a regular bipartite graph, we show that the design is A-optimum. We also show a construction of SBBD using an ($r,\lambda$)-design and an ordered design. A BIBD with prime power blocks gives an A-optimum semi-regular or regular SBBD. At last, we mention that this SBBD is able to use for deep learning.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.
We propose a novel approach to multimodal sentiment analysis using deep neural networks combining visual analysis and natural language processing. Our goal is different than the standard sentiment analysis goal of predicting whether a sentence expresses positive or negative sentiment; instead, we aim to infer the latent emotional state of the user. Thus, we focus on predicting the emotion word tags attached by users to their Tumblr posts, treating these as "self-reported emotions." We demonstrate that our multimodal model combining both text and image features outperforms separate models based solely on either images or text. Our model's results are interpretable, automatically yielding sensible word lists associated with emotions. We explore the structure of emotions implied by our model and compare it to what has been posited in the psychology literature, and validate our model on a set of images that have been used in psychology studies. Finally, our work also provides a useful tool for the growing academic study of images - both photographs and memes - on social networks.