There is increasing interest in data-driven approaches for recommending optimal treatment strategies in many chronic disease management and critical care applications. Reinforcement learning methods are well-suited to this sequential decision-making problem, but must be trained and evaluated exclusively on retrospective medical record datasets as direct online exploration is unsafe and infeasible. Despite this requirement, the vast majority of treatment optimization studies use off-policy RL methods (e.g., Double Deep Q Networks (DDQN) or its variants) that are known to perform poorly in purely offline settings. Recent advances in offline RL, such as Conservative Q-Learning (CQL), offer a suitable alternative. But there remain challenges in adapting these approaches to real-world applications where suboptimal examples dominate the retrospective dataset and strict safety constraints need to be satisfied. In this work, we introduce a practical and theoretically grounded transition sampling approach to address action imbalance during offline RL training. We perform extensive experiments on two real-world tasks for diabetes and sepsis treatment optimization to compare performance of the proposed approach against prominent off-policy and offline RL baselines (DDQN and CQL). Across a range of principled and clinically relevant metrics, we show that our proposed approach enables substantial improvements in expected health outcomes and in accordance with relevant practice and safety guidelines.
The detection of disfluencies such as hesitations, repetitions and false starts commonly found in speech is a widely studied area of research. With a standardised process for evaluation using the Switchboard Corpus, model performance can be easily compared across approaches. This is not the case for disfluency detection research on learner speech, however, where such datasets have restricted access policies, making comparison and subsequent development of improved models more challenging. To address this issue, this paper describes the adaptation of the NICT-JLE corpus, containing approximately 300 hours of English learners' oral proficiency tests, to a format that is suitable for disfluency detection model training and evaluation. Points of difference between the NICT-JLE and Switchboard corpora are explored, followed by a detailed overview of adaptations to the tag set and meta-features of the NICT-JLE corpus. The result of this work provides a standardised train, heldout and test set for use in future research on disfluency detection for learner speech.
Automated synthesis of provably correct controllers for cyber-physical systems is crucial for deployment in safety-critical scenarios. However, hybrid features and stochastic or unknown behaviours make this problem challenging. We propose a method for synthesising controllers for Markov jump linear systems (MJLSs), a class of discrete-time models for cyber-physical systems, so that they certifiably satisfy probabilistic computation tree logic (PCTL) formulae. An MJLS consists of a finite set of stochastic linear dynamics and discrete jumps between these dynamics that are governed by a Markov decision process (MDP). We consider the cases where the transition probabilities of this MDP are either known up to an interval or completely unknown. Our approach is based on a finite-state abstraction that captures both the discrete (mode-jumping) and continuous (stochastic linear) behaviour of the MJLS. We formalise this abstraction as an interval MDP (iMDP) for which we compute intervals of transition probabilities using sampling techniques from the so-called 'scenario approach', resulting in a probabilistically sound approximation. We apply our method to multiple realistic benchmark problems, in particular, a temperature control and an aerial vehicle delivery problem.
Accurate load forecasting plays a vital role in numerous sectors, but accurately capturing the complex dynamics of dynamic power systems remains a challenge for traditional statistical models. For these reasons, time-series models (ARIMA) and deep-learning models (ANN, LSTM, GRU, etc.) are commonly deployed and often experience higher success. In this paper, we analyze the efficacy of the recently developed Transformer-based Neural Network model in Load forecasting. Transformer models have the potential to improve Load forecasting because of their ability to learn long-range dependencies derived from their Attention Mechanism. We apply several metaheuristics namely Differential Evolution to find the optimal hyperparameters of the Transformer-based Neural Network to produce accurate forecasts. Differential Evolution provides scalable, robust, global solutions to non-differentiable, multi-objective, or constrained optimization problems. Our work compares the proposed Transformer based Neural Network model integrated with different metaheuristic algorithms by their performance in Load forecasting based on numerical metrics such as Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Our findings demonstrate the potential of metaheuristic-enhanced Transformer-based Neural Network models in Load forecasting accuracy and provide optimal hyperparameters for each model.
Inverse propensity weighting (IPW) is a popular method for estimating treatment effects from observational data. However, its correctness relies on the untestable (and frequently implausible) assumption that all confounders have been measured. This paper introduces a robust sensitivity analysis for IPW that estimates the range of treatment effects compatible with a given amount of unobserved confounding. The estimated range converges to the narrowest possible interval (under the given assumptions) that must contain the true treatment effect. Our proposal is a refinement of the influential sensitivity analysis by Zhao, Small, and Bhattacharya (2019), which we show gives bounds that are too wide even asymptotically. This analysis is based on new partial identification results for Tan (2006)'s marginal sensitivity model.
Classification and segmentation are crucial in medical image analysis as they enable accurate diagnosis and disease monitoring. However, current methods often prioritize the mutual learning features and shared model parameters, while neglecting the reliability of features and performances. In this paper, we propose a novel Uncertainty-informed Mutual Learning (UML) framework for reliable and interpretable medical image analysis. Our UML introduces reliability to joint classification and segmentation tasks, leveraging mutual learning with uncertainty to improve performance. To achieve this, we first use evidential deep learning to provide image-level and pixel-wise confidences. Then, an Uncertainty Navigator Decoder is constructed for better using mutual features and generating segmentation results. Besides, an Uncertainty Instructor is proposed to screen reliable masks for classification. Overall, UML could produce confidence estimation in features and performance for each link (classification and segmentation). The experiments on the public datasets demonstrate that our UML outperforms existing methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness. Our UML has the potential to explore the development of more reliable and explainable medical image analysis models. We will release the codes for reproduction after acceptance.
Trust-aware human-robot interaction (HRI) has received increasing research attention, as trust has been shown to be a crucial factor for effective HRI. Research in trust-aware HRI discovered a dilemma -- maximizing task rewards often leads to decreased human trust, while maximizing human trust would compromise task performance. In this work, we address this dilemma by formulating the HRI process as a two-player Markov game and utilizing the reward-shaping technique to improve human trust while limiting performance loss. Specifically, we show that when the shaping reward is potential-based, the performance loss can be bounded by the potential functions evaluated at the final states of the Markov game. We apply the proposed framework to the experience-based trust model, resulting in a linear program that can be efficiently solved and deployed in real-world applications. We evaluate the proposed framework in a simulation scenario where a human-robot team performs a search-and-rescue mission. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework successfully modifies the robot's optimal policy, enabling it to increase human trust at a minimal task performance cost.
Multi-modal fusion is a fundamental task for the perception of an autonomous driving system, which has recently intrigued many researchers. However, achieving a rather good performance is not an easy task due to the noisy raw data, underutilized information, and the misalignment of multi-modal sensors. In this paper, we provide a literature review of the existing multi-modal-based methods for perception tasks in autonomous driving. Generally, we make a detailed analysis including over 50 papers leveraging perception sensors including LiDAR and camera trying to solve object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. Different from traditional fusion methodology for categorizing fusion models, we propose an innovative way that divides them into two major classes, four minor classes by a more reasonable taxonomy in the view of the fusion stage. Moreover, we dive deep into the current fusion methods, focusing on the remaining problems and open-up discussions on the potential research opportunities. In conclusion, what we expect to do in this paper is to present a new taxonomy of multi-modal fusion methods for the autonomous driving perception tasks and provoke thoughts of the fusion-based techniques in the future.
Spatio-temporal forecasting is challenging attributing to the high nonlinearity in temporal dynamics as well as complex location-characterized patterns in spatial domains, especially in fields like weather forecasting. Graph convolutions are usually used for modeling the spatial dependency in meteorology to handle the irregular distribution of sensors' spatial location. In this work, a novel graph-based convolution for imitating the meteorological flows is proposed to capture the local spatial patterns. Based on the assumption of smoothness of location-characterized patterns, we propose conditional local convolution whose shared kernel on nodes' local space is approximated by feedforward networks, with local representations of coordinate obtained by horizon maps into cylindrical-tangent space as its input. The established united standard of local coordinate system preserves the orientation on geography. We further propose the distance and orientation scaling terms to reduce the impacts of irregular spatial distribution. The convolution is embedded in a Recurrent Neural Network architecture to model the temporal dynamics, leading to the Conditional Local Convolution Recurrent Network (CLCRN). Our model is evaluated on real-world weather benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with obvious improvements. We conduct further analysis on local pattern visualization, model's framework choice, advantages of horizon maps and etc.
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, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.