Among different phases of the life cycle of a building or facility, design is of the utmost importance to ensure safety, efficiency and sustainability of the building or facility. How to control and improve design quality and efficiency has been explored for years, and more studies emerged with the popularization of Building Information Modelling (BIM). However, most of them focused on the extraction of design behaviors, while paying less attention to how a design is formed. Therefore, this study proposes an approach to tracking and replaying the BIM-based design process by integrating data logging and 4D visualization techniques. First of all, potential design behaviors and procedures are analyzed and extracted by observing how a designer designs a BIM model. Meanwhile, the required data for logging design process is defined and a relevant method to collect these data is developed based on the APIs of BIM software. Then, strategies on how to visualize different design procedures are designed and implemented via 4D visualization. Finally, a prototype system is developed based on Autodesk Revit and validated through a case study. Result shows that the proposed approach enables intuitively and interactively review of the design process, and makes it easier to understand design behaviors and even identify potential pitfalls, thus improving the design efficiency and quality.
In recent years, by leveraging more data, computation, and diverse tasks, learned optimizers have achieved remarkable success in supervised learning, outperforming classical hand-designed optimizers. Reinforcement learning (RL) is essentially different from supervised learning and in practice these learned optimizers do not work well even in simple RL tasks. We investigate this phenomenon and identity three issues. First, the gradients of an RL agent vary across a wide range in logarithms while their absolute values are in a small range, making neural networks hard to obtain accurate parameter updates. Second, the agent-gradient distribution is non-independent and identically distributed, leading to inefficient meta-training. Finally, due to highly stochastic agent-environment interactions, the agent-gradients have high bias and variance, which increase the difficulty of learning an optimizer for RL. We propose gradient processing, pipeline training, and a novel optimizer structure with good inductive bias to address these issues. By applying these techniques, for the first time, we show that learning an optimizer for RL from scratch is possible. Although only trained in toy tasks, our learned optimizer can generalize to unseen complex tasks in Brax.
Difference-in-differences (DiD) is a popular method to evaluate treatment effects of real-world policy interventions. Several approaches have previously developed under alternative identifying assumptions in settings where pre- and post-treatment outcome measurements are available. However, these approaches suffer from several limitations, either (i) they only apply to continuous outcomes and the average treatment effect on the treated, or (ii) they depend on the scale of outcome, or (iii) they assume the absence of unmeasured confounding given pre-treatment covariate and outcome measurements, or (iv) they lack semiparametric efficiency theory. In this paper, we develop a new framework for causal identification and inference in DiD settings that satisfies (i)-(iv), making it universally applicable, unlike existing DiD methods. Key to our framework is an odds ratio equi-confounding (OREC) assumption, which states that the generalized odds ratio relating treatment and treatment-free potential outcome is stable across pre- and post-treatment periods. Under the OREC assumption, we establish nonparametric identification for any potential treatment effect on the treated in view, which in principle would be identifiable under the stronger assumption of no unmeasured confounding. Moreover, we develop a consistent, asymptotically linear, and semiparametric efficient estimator of treatment effects on the treated by leveraging recent learning theory. We illustrate our framework with extensive simulation studies and two well-established real-world applications in labor economics and traffic safety evaluation.
3D single object tracking with point clouds is a critical task in 3D computer vision. Previous methods usually input the last two frames and use the predicted box to get the template point cloud in previous frame and the search area point cloud in the current frame respectively, then use similarity-based or motion-based methods to predict the current box. Although these methods achieved good tracking performance, they ignore the historical information of the target, which is important for tracking. In this paper, compared to inputting two frames of point clouds, we input multi-frame of point clouds to encode the spatio-temporal information of the target and learn the motion information of the target implicitly, which could build the correlations among different frames to track the target in the current frame efficiently. Meanwhile, rather than directly using the point feature for feature fusion, we first crop the point cloud features into many patches and then use sparse attention mechanism to encode the patch-level similarity and finally fuse the multi-frame features. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves competitive results on challenging large-scale benchmarks (62.6% in KITTI and 49.66% in NuScenes).
The rapid changes in the finance industry due to the increasing amount of data have revolutionized the techniques on data processing and data analysis and brought new theoretical and computational challenges. In contrast to classical stochastic control theory and other analytical approaches for solving financial decision-making problems that heavily reply on model assumptions, new developments from reinforcement learning (RL) are able to make full use of the large amount of financial data with fewer model assumptions and to improve decisions in complex financial environments. This survey paper aims to review the recent developments and use of RL approaches in finance. We give an introduction to Markov decision processes, which is the setting for many of the commonly used RL approaches. Various algorithms are then introduced with a focus on value and policy based methods that do not require any model assumptions. Connections are made with neural networks to extend the framework to encompass deep RL algorithms. Our survey concludes by discussing the application of these RL algorithms in a variety of decision-making problems in finance, including optimal execution, portfolio optimization, option pricing and hedging, market making, smart order routing, and robo-advising.
This paper serves as a survey of recent advances in large margin training and its theoretical foundations, mostly for (nonlinear) deep neural networks (DNNs) that are probably the most prominent machine learning models for large-scale data in the community over the past decade. We generalize the formulation of classification margins from classical research to latest DNNs, summarize theoretical connections between the margin, network generalization, and robustness, and introduce recent efforts in enlarging the margins for DNNs comprehensively. Since the viewpoint of different methods is discrepant, we categorize them into groups for ease of comparison and discussion in the paper. Hopefully, our discussions and overview inspire new research work in the community that aim to improve the performance of DNNs, and we also point to directions where the large margin principle can be verified to provide theoretical evidence why certain regularizations for DNNs function well in practice. We managed to shorten the paper such that the crucial spirit of large margin learning and related methods are better emphasized.
With the explosion of online news, personalized news recommendation becomes increasingly important for online news platforms to help their users find interesting information. Existing news recommendation methods achieve personalization by building accurate news representations from news content and user representations from their direct interactions with news (e.g., click), while ignoring the high-order relatedness between users and news. Here we propose a news recommendation method which can enhance the representation learning of users and news by modeling their relatedness in a graph setting. In our method, users and news are both viewed as nodes in a bipartite graph constructed from historical user click behaviors. For news representations, a transformer architecture is first exploited to build news semantic representations. Then we combine it with the information from neighbor news in the graph via a graph attention network. For user representations, we not only represent users from their historically clicked news, but also attentively incorporate the representations of their neighbor users in the graph. Improved performances on a large-scale real-world dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Reasoning with knowledge expressed in natural language and Knowledge Bases (KBs) is a major challenge for Artificial Intelligence, with applications in machine reading, dialogue, and question answering. General neural architectures that jointly learn representations and transformations of text are very data-inefficient, and it is hard to analyse their reasoning process. These issues are addressed by end-to-end differentiable reasoning systems such as Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs), although they can only be used with small-scale symbolic KBs. In this paper we first propose Greedy NTPs (GNTPs), an extension to NTPs addressing their complexity and scalability limitations, thus making them applicable to real-world datasets. This result is achieved by dynamically constructing the computation graph of NTPs and including only the most promising proof paths during inference, thus obtaining orders of magnitude more efficient models. Then, we propose a novel approach for jointly reasoning over KBs and textual mentions, by embedding logic facts and natural language sentences in a shared embedding space. We show that GNTPs perform on par with NTPs at a fraction of their cost while achieving competitive link prediction results on large datasets, providing explanations for predictions, and inducing interpretable models. Source code, datasets, and supplementary material are available online at //github.com/uclnlp/gntp.
State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches with shallow or deep models -- usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely neglected recently due to the availability of vast amount of data, and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors. A great challenge for using knowledge bases for recommendation is how to integrated large-scale structured and unstructured data, while taking advantage of collaborative filtering for highly accurate performance. Recent achievements on knowledge base embedding sheds light on this problem, which makes it possible to learn user and item representations while preserving the structure of their relationship with external knowledge. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for personalized recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning approach to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation. Experimental results on real-world dataset verified the superior performance of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
ASR (automatic speech recognition) systems like Siri, Alexa, Google Voice or Cortana has become quite popular recently. One of the key techniques enabling the practical use of such systems in people's daily life is deep learning. Though deep learning in computer vision is known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, little is known whether such perturbations are still valid on the practical speech recognition. In this paper, we not only demonstrate such attacks can happen in reality, but also show that the attacks can be systematically conducted. To minimize users' attention, we choose to embed the voice commands into a song, called CommandSong. In this way, the song carrying the command can spread through radio, TV or even any media player installed in the portable devices like smartphones, potentially impacting millions of users in long distance. In particular, we overcome two major challenges: minimizing the revision of a song in the process of embedding commands, and letting the CommandSong spread through the air without losing the voice "command". Our evaluation demonstrates that we can craft random songs to "carry" any commands and the modify is extremely difficult to be noticed. Specially, the physical attack that we play the CommandSongs over the air and record them can success with 94 percentage.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.