Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as an innovative solution for controlling legged robots in challenging environments using minimalist architectures. Traditional control methods for legged robots, such as inverse dynamics, either directly manage joint torques or use proportional-derivative (PD) controllers to regulate joint positions at a higher level. In case of DRL, direct torque control presents significant challenges, leading to a preference for joint position control. However, this approach necessitates careful adjustment of joint PD gains, which can limit both adaptability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose GainAdaptor, an adaptive gain control framework that autonomously tunes joint PD gains to enhance terrain adaptability and energy efficiency. The framework employs a dual-actor algorithm to dynamically adjust the PD gains based on varying ground conditions. By utilizing a divided action space, GainAdaptor efficiently learns stable and energy-efficient locomotion. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method through experiments conducted on a Unitree Go1 robot, demonstrating improved locomotion performance across diverse terrains.
Multimodal machine learning is a vibrant multi-disciplinary research field that aims to design computer agents with intelligent capabilities such as understanding, reasoning, and learning through integrating multiple communicative modalities, including linguistic, acoustic, visual, tactile, and physiological messages. With the recent interest in video understanding, embodied autonomous agents, text-to-image generation, and multisensor fusion in application domains such as healthcare and robotics, multimodal machine learning has brought unique computational and theoretical challenges to the machine learning community given the heterogeneity of data sources and the interconnections often found between modalities. However, the breadth of progress in multimodal research has made it difficult to identify the common themes and open questions in the field. By synthesizing a broad range of application domains and theoretical frameworks from both historical and recent perspectives, this paper is designed to provide an overview of the computational and theoretical foundations of multimodal machine learning. We start by defining two key principles of modality heterogeneity and interconnections that have driven subsequent innovations, and propose a taxonomy of 6 core technical challenges: representation, alignment, reasoning, generation, transference, and quantification covering historical and recent trends. Recent technical achievements will be presented through the lens of this taxonomy, allowing researchers to understand the similarities and differences across new approaches. We end by motivating several open problems for future research as identified by our taxonomy.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Federated learning (FL) has been developed as a promising framework to leverage the resources of edge devices, enhance customers' privacy, comply with regulations, and reduce development costs. Although many methods and applications have been developed for FL, several critical challenges for practical FL systems remain unaddressed. This paper provides an outlook on FL development, categorized into five emerging directions of FL, namely algorithm foundation, personalization, hardware and security constraints, lifelong learning, and nonstandard data. Our unique perspectives are backed by practical observations from large-scale federated systems for edge devices.
Meta-learning has gained wide popularity as a training framework that is more data-efficient than traditional machine learning methods. However, its generalization ability in complex task distributions, such as multimodal tasks, has not been thoroughly studied. Recently, some studies on multimodality-based meta-learning have emerged. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the multimodality-based meta-learning landscape in terms of the methodologies and applications. We first formalize the definition of meta-learning and multimodality, along with the research challenges in this growing field, such as how to enrich the input in few-shot or zero-shot scenarios and how to generalize the models to new tasks. We then propose a new taxonomy to systematically discuss typical meta-learning algorithms combined with multimodal tasks. We investigate the contributions of related papers and summarize them by our taxonomy. Finally, we propose potential research directions for this promising field.
Causality knowledge is vital to building robust AI systems. Deep learning models often perform poorly on tasks that require causal reasoning, which is often derived using some form of commonsense knowledge not immediately available in the input but implicitly inferred by humans. Prior work has unraveled spurious observational biases that models fall prey to in the absence of causality. While language representation models preserve contextual knowledge within learned embeddings, they do not factor in causal relationships during training. By blending causal relationships with the input features to an existing model that performs visual cognition tasks (such as scene understanding, video captioning, video question-answering, etc.), better performance can be achieved owing to the insight causal relationships bring about. Recently, several models have been proposed that have tackled the task of mining causal data from either the visual or textual modality. However, there does not exist widespread research that mines causal relationships by juxtaposing the visual and language modalities. While images offer a rich and easy-to-process resource for us to mine causality knowledge from, videos are denser and consist of naturally time-ordered events. Also, textual information offers details that could be implicit in videos. We propose iReason, a framework that infers visual-semantic commonsense knowledge using both videos and natural language captions. Furthermore, iReason's architecture integrates a causal rationalization module to aid the process of interpretability, error analysis and bias detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of iReason using a two-pronged comparative analysis with language representation learning models (BERT, GPT-2) as well as current state-of-the-art multimodal causality models.
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.
The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of hitherto attempts at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.
Graph convolutional network (GCN) has been successfully applied to many graph-based applications; however, training a large-scale GCN remains challenging. Current SGD-based algorithms suffer from either a high computational cost that exponentially grows with number of GCN layers, or a large space requirement for keeping the entire graph and the embedding of each node in memory. In this paper, we propose Cluster-GCN, a novel GCN algorithm that is suitable for SGD-based training by exploiting the graph clustering structure. Cluster-GCN works as the following: at each step, it samples a block of nodes that associate with a dense subgraph identified by a graph clustering algorithm, and restricts the neighborhood search within this subgraph. This simple but effective strategy leads to significantly improved memory and computational efficiency while being able to achieve comparable test accuracy with previous algorithms. To test the scalability of our algorithm, we create a new Amazon2M data with 2 million nodes and 61 million edges which is more than 5 times larger than the previous largest publicly available dataset (Reddit). For training a 3-layer GCN on this data, Cluster-GCN is faster than the previous state-of-the-art VR-GCN (1523 seconds vs 1961 seconds) and using much less memory (2.2GB vs 11.2GB). Furthermore, for training 4 layer GCN on this data, our algorithm can finish in around 36 minutes while all the existing GCN training algorithms fail to train due to the out-of-memory issue. Furthermore, Cluster-GCN allows us to train much deeper GCN without much time and memory overhead, which leads to improved prediction accuracy---using a 5-layer Cluster-GCN, we achieve state-of-the-art test F1 score 99.36 on the PPI dataset, while the previous best result was 98.71 by [16]. Our codes are publicly available at //github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/cluster_gcn.
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.