A common approach to learning mobile health (mHealth) intervention policies is linear Thompson sampling. Two desirable mHealth policy features are (1) pooling information across individuals and time and (2) incorporating a time-varying baseline reward. Previous approaches pooled information across individuals but not time, failing to capture trends in treatment effects over time. In addition, these approaches did not explicitly model the baseline reward, which limited the ability to precisely estimate the parameters in the differential reward model. In this paper, we propose a novel Thompson sampling algorithm, termed ''DML-TS-NNR'' that leverages (1) nearest-neighbors to efficiently pool information on the differential reward function across users and time and (2) the Double Machine Learning (DML) framework to explicitly model baseline rewards and stay agnostic to the supervised learning algorithms used. By explicitly modeling baseline rewards, we obtain smaller confidence sets for the differential reward parameters. We offer theoretical guarantees on the pseudo-regret, which are supported by empirical results. Importantly, the DML-TS-NNR algorithm demonstrates robustness to potential misspecifications in the baseline reward model.
Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) problems often encounter the challenge of sparse rewards. This challenge becomes even more pronounced when coordination among agents is necessary. As performance depends not only on one agent's behavior but rather on the joint behavior of multiple agents, finding an adequate solution becomes significantly harder. In this context, a group of agents can benefit from actively exploring different joint strategies in order to determine the most efficient one. In this paper, we propose an approach for rewarding strategies where agents collectively exhibit novel behaviors. We present JIM (Joint Intrinsic Motivation), a multi-agent intrinsic motivation method that follows the centralized learning with decentralized execution paradigm. JIM rewards joint trajectories based on a centralized measure of novelty designed to function in continuous environments. We demonstrate the strengths of this approach both in a synthetic environment designed to reveal shortcomings of state-of-the-art MADRL methods, and in simulated robotic tasks. Results show that joint exploration is crucial for solving tasks where the optimal strategy requires a high level of coordination.
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.
As Large Language Models make a breakthrough in natural language processing tasks (NLP), multimodal technique becomes extremely popular. However, it has been shown that multimodal NLP are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where the outputs of a model can be dramatically changed by a perturbation to the input. While several defense techniques have been proposed both in computer vision and NLP models, the multimodal robustness of models have not been fully explored. In this paper, we study the adversarial robustness provided by modifying loss function of pre-trained multimodal models, by restricting top K softmax outputs. Based on the evaluation and scoring, our experiments show that after a fine-tuning, adversarial robustness of pre-trained models can be significantly improved, against popular attacks. Further research should be studying, such as output diversity, generalization and the robustness-performance trade-off of this kind of loss functions. Our code will be available after this paper is accepted
Reinforcement learning can learn amortised design policies for designing sequences of experiments. However, current amortised methods rely on estimators of expected information gain (EIG) that require an exponential number of samples on the magnitude of the EIG to achieve an unbiased estimation. We propose the use of an alternative estimator based on the cross-entropy of the joint model distribution and a flexible proposal distribution. This proposal distribution approximates the true posterior of the model parameters given the experimental history and the design policy. Our method overcomes the exponential-sample complexity of previous approaches and provide more accurate estimates of high EIG values. More importantly, it allows learning of superior design policies, and is compatible with continuous and discrete design spaces, non-differentiable likelihoods and even implicit probabilistic models.
We study how to use guidance to improve the throughput of lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF). Previous studies have demonstrated that while incorporating guidance, such as highways, can accelerate MAPF algorithms, this often results in a trade-off with solution quality. In addition, how to generate good guidance automatically remains largely unexplored, with current methods falling short of surpassing manually designed ones. In this work, we introduce the directed guidance graph as a versatile representation of guidance for lifelong MAPF, framing Guidance Graph Optimization (GGO) as the task of optimizing its edge weights. We present two GGO algorithms to automatically generate guidance for arbitrary lifelong MAPF algorithms and maps. The first method directly solves GGO by employing CMA-ES, a black-box optimization algorithm. The second method, PIU, optimizes an update model capable of generating guidance, demonstrating the ability to transfer optimized guidance graphs to larger maps with similar layouts. Empirically, we show that (1) our guidance graphs improve the throughput of three representative lifelong MAPF algorithms in four benchmark maps, and (2) our update model can generate guidance graphs for as large as $93 \times 91$ maps and as many as 3000 agents.
In the high-stakes realm of healthcare, ensuring fairness in predictive models is crucial. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have become integral to medical decision-making, yet existing methods for enhancing model fairness restrict themselves to unimodal data and fail to address the multifaceted social biases intertwined with demographic factors in EHRs. To mitigate these biases, we present FairEHR-CLP: a general framework for Fairness-aware Clinical Predictions with Contrastive Learning in EHRs. FairEHR-CLP operates through a two-stage process, utilizing patient demographics, longitudinal data, and clinical notes. First, synthetic counterparts are generated for each patient, allowing for diverse demographic identities while preserving essential health information. Second, fairness-aware predictions employ contrastive learning to align patient representations across sensitive attributes, jointly optimized with an MLP classifier with a softmax layer for clinical classification tasks. Acknowledging the unique challenges in EHRs, such as varying group sizes and class imbalance, we introduce a novel fairness metric to effectively measure error rate disparities across subgroups. Extensive experiments on three diverse EHR datasets on three tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of FairEHR-CLP in terms of fairness and utility compared with competitive baselines. FairEHR-CLP represents an advancement towards ensuring both accuracy and equity in predictive healthcare models.
Deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Data Fusion techniques have gained popularity in public and government domains. This usually requires capturing and consolidating data from multiple sources. As datasets do not necessarily originate from identical sensors, fused data typically results in a complex data problem. Because military is investigating how heterogeneous IoT devices can aid processes and tasks, we investigate a multi-sensor approach. Moreover, we propose a signal to image encoding approach to transform information (signal) to integrate (fuse) data from IoT wearable devices to an image which is invertible and easier to visualize supporting decision making. Furthermore, we investigate the challenge of enabling an intelligent identification and detection operation and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection models that can support future application that utilizes hand gesture data from wearable devices.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proven to be effective in various network-related tasks. Most existing GNNs usually exploit the low-frequency signals of node features, which gives rise to one fundamental question: is the low-frequency information all we need in the real world applications? In this paper, we first present an experimental investigation assessing the roles of low-frequency and high-frequency signals, where the results clearly show that exploring low-frequency signal only is distant from learning an effective node representation in different scenarios. How can we adaptively learn more information beyond low-frequency information in GNNs? A well-informed answer can help GNNs enhance the adaptability. We tackle this challenge and propose a novel Frequency Adaptation Graph Convolutional Networks (FAGCN) with a self-gating mechanism, which can adaptively integrate different signals in the process of message passing. For a deeper understanding, we theoretically analyze the roles of low-frequency signals and high-frequency signals on learning node representations, which further explains why FAGCN can perform well on different types of networks. Extensive experiments on six real-world networks validate that FAGCN not only alleviates the over-smoothing problem, but also has advantages over the state-of-the-arts.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.