Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms have been proposed to search for a large collection of both diverse and high-performing solutions instead of a single set of local optima. While early QD algorithms view the objective and descriptor functions as black-box functions, novel tools have been introduced to use gradient information to accelerate the search and improve overall performance of those algorithms over continuous input spaces. However a broad range of applications involve discrete spaces, such as drug discovery or image generation. Exploring those spaces is challenging as they are combinatorially large and gradients cannot be used in the same manner as in continuous spaces. We introduce map-elites with a Gradient-Informed Discrete Emitter (ME-GIDE), which extends QD optimisation with differentiable functions over discrete search spaces. ME-GIDE leverages the gradient information of the objective and descriptor functions with respect to its discrete inputs to propose gradient-informed updates that guide the search towards a diverse set of high quality solutions. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks including protein design and discrete latent space illumination and find that our method outperforms state-of-the-art QD algorithms in all benchmarks.
Counterfactual inference aims to answer retrospective "what if" questions and thus belongs to the most fine-grained type of inference in Pearl's causality ladder. Existing methods for counterfactual inference with continuous outcomes aim at point identification and thus make strong and unnatural assumptions about the underlying structural causal model. In this paper, we relax these assumptions and aim at partial counterfactual identification of continuous outcomes, i.e., when the counterfactual query resides in an ignorance interval with informative bounds. We prove that, in general, the ignorance interval of the counterfactual queries has non-informative bounds, already when functions of structural causal models are continuously differentiable. As a remedy, we propose a novel sensitivity model called Curvature Sensitivity Model. This allows us to obtain informative bounds by bounding the curvature of level sets of the functions. We further show that existing point counterfactual identification methods are special cases of our Curvature Sensitivity Model when the bound of the curvature is set to zero. We then propose an implementation of our Curvature Sensitivity Model in the form of a novel deep generative model, which we call Augmented Pseudo-Invertible Decoder. Our implementation employs (i) residual normalizing flows with (ii) variational augmentations. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our Augmented Pseudo-Invertible Decoder. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first partial identification model for Markovian structural causal models with continuous outcomes.
Neural collapse provides an elegant mathematical characterization of learned last layer representations (a.k.a. features) and classifier weights in deep classification models. Such results not only provide insights but also motivate new techniques for improving practical deep models. However, most of the existing empirical and theoretical studies in neural collapse focus on the case that the number of classes is small relative to the dimension of the feature space. This paper extends neural collapse to cases where the number of classes are much larger than the dimension of feature space, which broadly occur for language models, retrieval systems, and face recognition applications. We show that the features and classifier exhibit a generalized neural collapse phenomenon, where the minimum one-vs-rest margins is maximized.We provide empirical study to verify the occurrence of generalized neural collapse in practical deep neural networks. Moreover, we provide theoretical study to show that the generalized neural collapse provably occurs under unconstrained feature model with spherical constraint, under certain technical conditions on feature dimension and number of classes.
We present an approach to the verification of systems for whose description some elements - constants or functions - are underspecified and can be regarded as parameters, and, in particular, describe a method for automatically generating constraints on such parameters under which certain safety conditions are guaranteed to hold. We present an implementation and illustrate its use on several examples.
Temporal relation extraction models have thus far been hindered by a number of issues in existing temporal relation-annotated news datasets, including: (1) low inter-annotator agreement due to the lack of specificity of their annotation guidelines in terms of what counts as a temporal relation; (2) the exclusion of long-distance relations within a given document (those spanning across different paragraphs); and (3) the exclusion of events that are not centred on verbs. This paper aims to alleviate these issues by presenting a new annotation scheme that clearly defines the criteria based on which temporal relations should be annotated. Additionally, the scheme includes events even if they are not expressed as verbs (e.g., nominalised events). Furthermore, we propose a method for annotating all temporal relations -- including long-distance ones -- which automates the process, hence reducing time and manual effort on the part of annotators. The result is a new dataset, the TIMELINE corpus, in which improved inter-annotator agreement was obtained, in comparison with previously reported temporal relation datasets. We report the results of training and evaluating baseline temporal relation extraction models on the new corpus, and compare them with results obtained on the widely used MATRES corpus.
High sample complexity has long been a challenge for RL. On the other hand, humans learn to perform tasks not only from interaction or demonstrations, but also by reading unstructured text documents, e.g., instruction manuals. Instruction manuals and wiki pages are among the most abundant data that could inform agents of valuable features and policies or task-specific environmental dynamics and reward structures. Therefore, we hypothesize that the ability to utilize human-written instruction manuals to assist learning policies for specific tasks should lead to a more efficient and better-performing agent. We propose the Read and Reward framework. Read and Reward speeds up RL algorithms on Atari games by reading manuals released by the Atari game developers. Our framework consists of a QA Extraction module that extracts and summarizes relevant information from the manual and a Reasoning module that evaluates object-agent interactions based on information from the manual. An auxiliary reward is then provided to a standard A2C RL agent, when interaction is detected. Experimentally, various RL algorithms obtain significant improvement in performance and training speed when assisted by our design.
The persistent homology transform (PHT) represents a shape with a multiset of persistence diagrams parameterized by the sphere of directions in the ambient space. In this work, we describe a finite set of diagrams that discretize the PHT such that it faithfully represents the underlying shape. We provide a discretization that is exponential in the dimension of the shape. Moreover, we show that this discretization is stable with respect to various perturbations. Furthermore, we provide an algorithm for computing the discretization. Our approach relies only on knowing the heights and dimensions of topological events, which means that it can be adapted to provide discretizations of other dimension-returning topological transforms, including the Betti curve transform. With mild alterations, we also adapt our methods to faithfully discretize the Euler Characteristic curve transform.
Community Question Answering (CQA) in different domains is growing at a large scale because of the availability of several platforms and huge shareable information among users. With the rapid growth of such online platforms, a massive amount of archived data makes it difficult for moderators to retrieve possible duplicates for a new question and identify and confirm existing question pairs as duplicates at the right time. This problem is even more critical in CQAs corresponding to large software systems like askubuntu where moderators need to be experts to comprehend something as a duplicate. Note that the prime challenge in such CQA platforms is that the moderators are themselves experts and are therefore usually extremely busy with their time being extraordinarily expensive. To facilitate the task of the moderators, in this work, we have tackled two significant issues for the askubuntu CQA platform: (1) retrieval of duplicate questions given a new question and (2) duplicate question confirmation time prediction. In the first task, we focus on retrieving duplicate questions from a question pool for a particular newly posted question. In the second task, we solve a regression problem to rank a pair of questions that could potentially take a long time to get confirmed as duplicates. For duplicate question retrieval, we propose a Siamese neural network based approach by exploiting both text and network-based features, which outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline techniques. Our method outperforms DupPredictor and DUPE by 5% and 7% respectively. For duplicate confirmation time prediction, we have used both the standard machine learning models and neural network along with the text and graph-based features. We obtain Spearman's rank correlation of 0.20 and 0.213 (statistically significant) for text and graph based features respectively.
We study the problem of determining the emergent behaviors that are possible given a functionally heterogeneous swarm of robots with limited capabilities. Prior work has considered behavior search for homogeneous swarms and proposed the use of novelty search over either a hand-specified or learned behavior space followed by clustering to return a taxonomy of emergent behaviors to the user. In this paper, we seek to better understand the role of novelty search and the efficacy of using clustering to discover novel emergent behaviors. Through a large set of experiments and ablations, we analyze the effect of representations, evolutionary search, and various clustering methods in the search for novel behaviors in a heterogeneous swarm. Our results indicate that prior methods fail to discover many interesting behaviors and that an iterative human-in-the-loop discovery process discovers more behaviors than random search, swarm chemistry, and automated behavior discovery. The combined discoveries of our experiments uncover 23 emergent behaviors, 18 of which are novel discoveries. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first known emergent behaviors for heterogeneous swarms of computation-free agents. Videos, code, and appendix are available at the project website: //sites.google.com/view/heterogeneous-bd-methods
We study the sensitivity of infinite-dimensional Bayesian linear inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) with respect to modeling uncertainties. In particular, we consider derivative-based sensitivity analysis of the information gain, as measured by the Kullback-Leibler divergence from the posterior to the prior distribution. To facilitate this, we develop a fast and accurate method for computing derivatives of the information gain with respect to auxiliary model parameters. Our approach combines low-rank approximations, adjoint-based eigenvalue sensitivity analysis, and post-optimal sensitivity analysis. The proposed approach also paves way for global sensitivity analysis by computing derivative-based global sensitivity measures. We illustrate different aspects of the proposed approach using an inverse problem governed by a scalar linear elliptic PDE, and an inverse problem governed by the three-dimensional equations of linear elasticity, which is motivated by the inversion of the fault-slip field after an earthquake.
We discuss a vulnerability involving a category of attribution methods used to provide explanations for the outputs of convolutional neural networks working as classifiers. It is known that this type of networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in which imperceptible perturbations of the input may alter the outputs of the model. In contrast, here we focus on effects that small modifications in the model may cause on the attribution method without altering the model outputs.