What is a useful skill hierarchy for an autonomous agent? We propose an answer based on the graphical structure of an agent's interaction with its environment. Our approach uses hierarchical graph partitioning to expose the structure of the graph at varying timescales, producing a skill hierarchy with multiple levels of abstraction. At each level of the hierarchy, skills move the agent between regions of the state space that are well connected within themselves but weakly connected to each other. We illustrate the utility of the proposed skill hierarchy in a wide variety of domains in the context of reinforcement learning.
Collaborative robots require effective human intention estimation to safely and smoothly work with humans in less structured tasks such as industrial assembly, where human intention continuously changes. We propose the concept of intention tracking and introduce a collaborative robot system that concurrently tracks intentions at hierarchical levels. The high-level intention is tracked to estimate human's interaction pattern and enable robot to (1) avoid collision with human to minimize interruption and (2) assist human to correct failure. The low-level intention estimate provides robot with task-related information. We implement the system on a UR5e robot and demonstrate robust, seamless and ergonomic human-robot collaboration in an ablative pilot study of an assembly use case. Our robot demonstrations and videos are available at \url{//sites.google.com/view/hierarchicalintentiontracking}.
We present an efficient reinforcement learning algorithm that learns the optimal admission control policy in a partially observable queueing network. Specifically, only the arrival and departure times from the network are observable, and optimality refers to the average holding/rejection cost in infinite horizon. While reinforcement learning in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) is prohibitively expensive in general, we show that our algorithm has a regret that only depends sub-linearly on the maximal number of jobs in the network, $S$. In particular, in contrast with existing regret analyses, our regret bound does not depend on the diameter of the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP), which in most queueing systems is at least exponential in $S$. The novelty of our approach is to leverage Norton's equivalent theorem for closed product-form queueing networks and an efficient reinforcement learning algorithm for MDPs with the structure of birth-and-death processes.
Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
Following unprecedented success on the natural language tasks, Transformers have been successfully applied to several computer vision problems, achieving state-of-the-art results and prompting researchers to reconsider the supremacy of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as {de facto} operators. Capitalizing on these advances in computer vision, the medical imaging field has also witnessed growing interest for Transformers that can capture global context compared to CNNs with local receptive fields. Inspired from this transition, in this survey, we attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the applications of Transformers in medical imaging covering various aspects, ranging from recently proposed architectural designs to unsolved issues. Specifically, we survey the use of Transformers in medical image segmentation, detection, classification, reconstruction, synthesis, registration, clinical report generation, and other tasks. In particular, for each of these applications, we develop taxonomy, identify application-specific challenges as well as provide insights to solve them, and highlight recent trends. Further, we provide a critical discussion of the field's current state as a whole, including the identification of key challenges, open problems, and outlining promising future directions. We hope this survey will ignite further interest in the community and provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of Transformer models in medical imaging. Finally, to cope with the rapid development in this field, we intend to regularly update the relevant latest papers and their open-source implementations at \url{//github.com/fahadshamshad/awesome-transformers-in-medical-imaging}.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher NDCG@100 than the state of the art.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis.