We propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning dynamics, and analyze its convergence in infinite-horizon discounted Markov potential games. We focus on the independent and decentralized setting, where players do not have knowledge of the game model and cannot coordinate. In each stage, players update their estimate of Q-function that evaluates their total contingent payoff based on the realized one-stage reward in an asynchronous manner. Then, players independently update their policies by incorporating an optimal one-stage deviation strategy based on the estimated Q-function. A key feature of the learning dynamics is that the Q-function estimates are updated at a faster timescale than the policies. We prove that the policies induced by our learning dynamics converge to the set of stationary Nash equilibria in Markov potential games with probability 1. Our results highlight the efficacy of simple learning dynamics in reaching to the set of stationary Nash equilibrium even in environments with minimal information available.
Visual grounding (VG) aims to locate a specific target in an image based on a given language query. The discriminative information from context is important for distinguishing the target from other objects, particularly for the targets that have the same category as others. However, most previous methods underestimate such information. Moreover, they are usually designed for the standard scene (without any novel object), which limits their generalization to the open-vocabulary scene. In this paper, we propose a novel framework with context disentangling and prototype inheriting for robust visual grounding to handle both scenes. Specifically, the context disentangling disentangles the referent and context features, which achieves better discrimination between them. The prototype inheriting inherits the prototypes discovered from the disentangled visual features by a prototype bank to fully utilize the seen data, especially for the open-vocabulary scene. The fused features, obtained by leveraging Hadamard product on disentangled linguistic and visual features of prototypes to avoid sharp adjusting the importance between the two types of features, are then attached with a special token and feed to a vision Transformer encoder for bounding box regression. Extensive experiments are conducted on both standard and open-vocabulary scenes. The performance comparisons indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both scenarios. {The code is available at //github.com/WayneTomas/TransCP.
Identifying clients with similar objectives and learning a model-per-cluster is an intuitive and interpretable approach to personalization in federated learning. However, doing so with provable and optimal guarantees has remained an open challenge. We formalize this problem as a stochastic optimization problem, achieving optimal convergence rates for a large class of loss functions. We propose simple iterative algorithms which identify clusters of similar clients and train a personalized model-per-cluster, using local client gradients and flexible constraints on the clusters. The convergence rates of our algorithms asymptotically match those obtained if we knew the true underlying clustering of the clients and are provably robust in the Byzantine setting where some fraction of the clients are malicious.
We propose a framework for applying reinforcement learning to contextual two-stage stochastic optimization and apply this framework to the problem of energy market bidding of an off-shore wind farm. Reinforcement learning could potentially be used to learn close to optimal solutions for first stage variables of a two-stage stochastic program under different contexts. Under the proposed framework, these solutions would be learned without having to solve the full two-stage stochastic program. We present initial results of training using the DDPG algorithm and present intended future steps to improve performance.
Re-training a deep learning model each time a single data point receives a new label is impractical due to the inherent complexity of the training process. Consequently, existing active learning (AL) algorithms tend to adopt a batch-based approach where, during each AL iteration, a set of data points is collectively chosen for annotation. However, this strategy frequently leads to redundant sampling, ultimately eroding the efficacy of the labeling procedure. In this paper, we introduce a new AL algorithm that harnesses the power of a Gaussian process surrogate in conjunction with the neural network principal learner. Our proposed model adeptly updates the surrogate learner for every new data instance, enabling it to emulate and capitalize on the continuous learning dynamics of the neural network without necessitating a complete retraining of the principal model for each individual label. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that this approach yields significant enhancements, either rivaling or aligning with the performance of state-of-the-art techniques.
Spatio-temporal representation learning is critical for video self-supervised representation. Recent approaches mainly use contrastive learning and pretext tasks. However, these approaches learn representation by discriminating sampled instances via feature similarity in the latent space while ignoring the intermediate state of the learned representations, which limits the overall performance. In this work, taking into account the degree of similarity of sampled instances as the intermediate state, we propose a novel pretext task - spatio-temporal overlap rate (STOR) prediction. It stems from the observation that humans are capable of discriminating the overlap rates of videos in space and time. This task encourages the model to discriminate the STOR of two generated samples to learn the representations. Moreover, we employ a joint optimization combining pretext tasks with contrastive learning to further enhance the spatio-temporal representation learning. We also study the mutual influence of each component in the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed STOR task can favor both contrastive learning and pretext tasks. The joint optimization scheme can significantly improve the spatio-temporal representation in video understanding. The code is available at //github.com/Katou2/CSTP.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
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.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.