We consider a two-player dynamic information design problem between a principal and a receiver -- a game is played between the two agents on top of a Markovian system controlled by the receiver's actions, where the principal obtains and strategically shares some information about the underlying system with the receiver in order to influence their actions. In our setting, both players have long-term objectives, and the principal sequentially commits to their strategies instead of committing at the beginning. Further, the principal cannot directly observe the system state, but at every turn they can choose randomized experiments to observe the system partially. The principal can share details about the experiments to the receiver. For our analysis we impose the truthful disclosure rule: the principal is required to truthfully announce the details and the result of each experiment to the receiver immediately after the experiment result is revealed. Based on the received information, the receiver takes an action when its their turn, with the action influencing the state of the underlying system. We show that there exist Perfect Bayesian equilibria in this game where both agents play Canonical Belief Based (CBB) strategies using a compressed version of their information, rather than full information, to choose experiments (for the principal) or actions (for the receiver). We also provide a backward inductive procedure to solve for an equilibrium in CBB strategies.
We consider a communication system where a group of users, interconnected in a bidirectional gossip network, wishes to follow a time-varying source, e.g., updates on an event, in real-time. The users wish to maintain their expected version ages below a threshold, and can either rely on gossip from their neighbors or directly subscribe to a server publishing about the event, if the former option does not meet the timeliness requirements. The server wishes to maximize its profit by increasing subscriptions from users and minimizing event sampling frequency to reduce costs. This leads to a Stackelberg game between the server and the users where the sender is the leader deciding its sampling frequency and the users are the followers deciding their subscription strategies. We investigate equilibrium strategies for low-connectivity and high-connectivity topologies.
Neural fields provide a continuous scene representation of 3D geometry and appearance in a way which has great promise for robotics applications. One functionality that unlocks unique use-cases for neural fields in robotics is object 6-DoF registration. In this paper, we provide an expanded analysis of the recent Reg-NF neural field registration method and its use-cases within a robotics context. We showcase the scenario of determining the 6-DoF pose of known objects within a scene using scene and object neural field models. We show how this may be used to better represent objects within imperfectly modelled scenes and generate new scenes by substituting object neural field models into the scene.
Mitigating bias in automated decision-making systems, specifically deep learning models, is a critical challenge in achieving fairness. This complexity stems from factors such as nuanced definitions of fairness, unique biases in each dataset, and the trade-off between fairness and model accuracy. To address such issues, we introduce FairVIC, an innovative approach designed to enhance fairness in neural networks by addressing inherent biases at the training stage. FairVIC differs from traditional approaches that typically address biases at the data preprocessing stage. Instead, it integrates variance, invariance and covariance into the loss function to minimise the model's dependency on protected characteristics for making predictions, thus promoting fairness. Our experimentation and evaluation consists of training neural networks on three datasets known for their biases, comparing our results to state-of-the-art algorithms, evaluating on different sizes of model architectures, and carrying out sensitivity analysis to examine the fairness-accuracy trade-off. Through our implementation of FairVIC, we observed a significant improvement in fairness across all metrics tested, without compromising the model's accuracy to a detrimental extent. Our findings suggest that FairVIC presents a straightforward, out-of-the-box solution for the development of fairer deep learning models, thereby offering a generalisable solution applicable across many tasks and datasets.
This paper introduces an approach to predicting the next event in a soccer match, a challenge bearing remarkable similarities to the problem faced by Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike other methods that severely limit event dynamics in soccer, often abstracting from many variables or relying on a mix of sequential models, our research proposes a novel technique inspired by the methodologies used in LLMs. These models predict a complete chain of variables that compose an event, significantly simplifying the construction of Large Event Models (LEMs) for soccer. Utilizing deep learning on the publicly available WyScout dataset, the proposed approach notably surpasses the performance of previous LEM proposals in critical areas, such as the prediction accuracy of the next event type. This paper highlights the utility of LEMs in various applications, including match prediction and analytics. Moreover, we show that LEMs provide a simulation backbone for users to build many analytics pipelines, an approach opposite to the current specialized single-purpose models. LEMs represent a pivotal advancement in soccer analytics, establishing a foundational framework for multifaceted analytics pipelines through a singular machine-learning model.
Recent developments in long-context large language models have attracted considerable attention. Yet, their real-world applications are often hindered by ineffective context information use. This work shows that structuring training data to increase semantic interdependence is an effective strategy for optimizing context utilization. To this end, we introduce Structured Packing for Long Context (SPLiCe), a method for creating training examples by using information retrieval methods to collate mutually relevant documents into a single training context. We empirically validate SPLiCe on large $3$B and $7$B models, showing perplexity improvements and better long-context utilization on downstream tasks. Remarkably, already relatively short fine-tuning with SPLiCe is enough to attain these benefits. Additionally, the comprehensive study of SPLiCe reveals intriguing transfer effects such as training on code data leading to perplexity improvements on text data.
Deep Learning (DL) frameworks play a critical role in advancing artificial intelligence, and their rapid growth underscores the need for a comprehensive understanding of software quality and maintainability. DL frameworks, like other systems, are prone to code clones. Code clones refer to identical or highly similar source code fragments within the same project or even across different projects. Code cloning can have positive and negative implications for software development, influencing maintenance, readability, and bug propagation. In this paper, we aim to address the knowledge gap concerning the evolutionary dimension of code clones in DL frameworks and the extent of code reuse across these frameworks. We empirically analyze code clones in nine popular DL frameworks, i.e., TensorFlow, Paddle, PyTorch, Aesara, Ray, MXNet, Keras, Jax and BentoML, to investigate (1) the characteristics of the long-term code cloning evolution over releases in each framework, (2) the short-term, i.e., within-release, code cloning patterns and their influence on the long-term trends, and (3) the file-level code clones within the DL frameworks. Our findings reveal that DL frameworks adopt four distinct cloning trends and that these trends present some common and distinct characteristics. For instance, bug-fixing activities persistently happen in clones irrespective of the clone evolutionary trend but occur more in the "Serpentine" trend. Moreover, the within release level investigation demonstrates that short-term code cloning practices impact long-term cloning trends. The cross-framework code clone investigation reveals the presence of functional and architectural adaptation file-level cross-framework code clones across the nine studied frameworks. We provide insights that foster robust clone practices and collaborative maintenance in the development of DL frameworks.
We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve a mystery under a fixed narrative premise, but can freely interact with non-player characters generated by GPT-4, a large language model. We recruit 28 gamers to play the game and use GPT-4 to automatically convert the game logs into a node-graph representing the narrative in the player's gameplay. We find that through their interactions with the non-deterministic behavior of the LLM, players are able to discover interesting new emergent nodes that were not a part of the original narrative but have potential for being fun and engaging. Players that created the most emergent nodes tended to be those that often enjoy games that facilitate discovery, exploration and experimentation.
The concept of causality plays an important role in human cognition . In the past few decades, causal inference has been well developed in many fields, such as computer science, medicine, economics, and education. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, it has been increasingly used in causal inference against counterfactual data. Typically, deep causal models map the characteristics of covariates to a representation space and then design various objective optimization functions to estimate counterfactual data unbiasedly based on the different optimization methods. This paper focuses on the survey of the deep causal models, and its core contributions are as follows: 1) we provide relevant metrics under multiple treatments and continuous-dose treatment; 2) we incorporate a comprehensive overview of deep causal models from both temporal development and method classification perspectives; 3) we assist a detailed and comprehensive classification and analysis of relevant datasets and source code.
Promoting behavioural diversity is critical for solving games with non-transitive dynamics where strategic cycles exist, and there is no consistent winner (e.g., Rock-Paper-Scissors). Yet, there is a lack of rigorous treatment for defining diversity and constructing diversity-aware learning dynamics. In this work, we offer a geometric interpretation of behavioural diversity in games and introduce a novel diversity metric based on \emph{determinantal point processes} (DPP). By incorporating the diversity metric into best-response dynamics, we develop \emph{diverse fictitious play} and \emph{diverse policy-space response oracle} for solving normal-form games and open-ended games. We prove the uniqueness of the diverse best response and the convergence of our algorithms on two-player games. Importantly, we show that maximising the DPP-based diversity metric guarantees to enlarge the \emph{gamescape} -- convex polytopes spanned by agents' mixtures of strategies. To validate our diversity-aware solvers, we test on tens of games that show strong non-transitivity. Results suggest that our methods achieve much lower exploitability than state-of-the-art solvers by finding effective and diverse strategies.
The demand for artificial intelligence has grown significantly over the last decade and this growth has been fueled by advances in machine learning techniques and the ability to leverage hardware acceleration. However, in order to increase the quality of predictions and render machine learning solutions feasible for more complex applications, a substantial amount of training data is required. Although small machine learning models can be trained with modest amounts of data, the input for training larger models such as neural networks grows exponentially with the number of parameters. Since the demand for processing training data has outpaced the increase in computation power of computing machinery, there is a need for distributing the machine learning workload across multiple machines, and turning the centralized into a distributed system. These distributed systems present new challenges, first and foremost the efficient parallelization of the training process and the creation of a coherent model. This article provides an extensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field by outlining the challenges and opportunities of distributed machine learning over conventional (centralized) machine learning, discussing the techniques used for distributed machine learning, and providing an overview of the systems that are available.