Standard imitation learning usually assumes that demonstrations are drawn from an optimal policy distribution. However, in real-world scenarios, every human demonstration may exhibit nearly random behavior and collecting high-quality human datasets can be quite costly. This requires imitation learning can learn from imperfect demonstrations to obtain robotic policies that align human intent. Prior work uses confidence scores to extract useful information from imperfect demonstrations, which relies on access to ground truth rewards or active human supervision. In this paper, we propose a dynamics-based method to evaluate the data confidence scores without above efforts. We develop a generalized confidence-based imitation learning framework called Confidence-based Inverse soft-Q Learning (CIQL), which can employ different optimal policy matching methods by simply changing object functions. Experimental results show that our confidence evaluation method can increase the success rate by $40.3\%$ over the original algorithm and $13.5\%$ over the simple noise filtering.
Reinforcement learning algorithms need exploration to learn. However, unsupervised exploration prevents the deployment of such algorithms on safety-critical tasks and limits real-world deployment. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called Ensemble Model Predictive Safety Certification that combines model-based deep reinforcement learning with tube-based model predictive control to correct the actions taken by a learning agent, keeping safety constraint violations at a minimum through planning. Our approach aims to reduce the amount of prior knowledge about the actual system by requiring only offline data generated by a safe controller. Our results show that we can achieve significantly fewer constraint violations than comparable reinforcement learning methods.
As machine learning becomes more prominent there is a growing demand to perform several inference tasks in parallel. Running a dedicated model for each task is computationally expensive and therefore there is a great interest in multi-task learning (MTL). MTL aims at learning a single model that solves several tasks efficiently. Optimizing MTL models is often achieved by computing a single gradient per task and aggregating them for obtaining a combined update direction. However, these approaches do not consider an important aspect, the sensitivity in the gradient dimensions. Here, we introduce a novel gradient aggregation approach using Bayesian inference. We place a probability distribution over the task-specific parameters, which in turn induce a distribution over the gradients of the tasks. This additional valuable information allows us to quantify the uncertainty in each of the gradients dimensions, which can then be factored in when aggregating them. We empirically demonstrate the benefits of our approach in a variety of datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Research in machine learning is making progress in fixing its own reproducibility crisis. Reinforcement learning (RL), in particular, faces its own set of unique challenges. Comparison of point estimates, and plots that show successful convergence to the optimal policy during training, may obfuscate overfitting or dependence on the experimental setup. Although researchers in RL have proposed reliability metrics that account for uncertainty to better understand each algorithm's strengths and weaknesses, the recommendations of past work do not assume the presence of out-of-distribution observations. We propose a set of evaluation methods that measure the robustness of RL algorithms under distribution shifts. The tools presented here argue for the need to account for performance over time while the agent is acting in its environment. In particular, we recommend time series analysis as a method of observational RL evaluation. We also show that the unique properties of RL and simulated dynamic environments allow us to make stronger assumptions to justify the measurement of causal impact in our evaluations. We then apply these tools to single-agent and multi-agent environments to show the impact of introducing distribution shifts during test time. We present this methodology as a first step toward rigorous RL evaluation in the presence of distribution shifts.
Correlation clustering is a powerful unsupervised learning paradigm that supports positive and negative similarities. In this paper, we assume the similarities are not known in advance. Instead, we employ active learning to iteratively query similarities in a cost-efficient way. In particular, we develop three effective acquisition functions to be used in this setting. One is based on the notion of inconsistency (i.e., when similarities violate the transitive property). The remaining two are based on information-theoretic quantities, i.e., entropy and information gain.
Reinforcement learning can learn amortised design policies for designing sequences of experiments. However, current amortised methods rely on estimators of expected information gain (EIG) that require an exponential number of samples on the magnitude of the EIG to achieve an unbiased estimation. We propose the use of an alternative estimator based on the cross-entropy of the joint model distribution and a flexible proposal distribution. This proposal distribution approximates the true posterior of the model parameters given the experimental history and the design policy. Our method overcomes the exponential-sample complexity of previous approaches and provide more accurate estimates of high EIG values. More importantly, it allows learning of superior design policies, and is compatible with continuous and discrete design spaces, non-differentiable likelihoods and even implicit probabilistic models.
In pervasive machine learning, especially in Human Behavior Analysis (HBA), RGB has been the primary modality due to its accessibility and richness of information. However, linked with its benefits are challenges, including sensitivity to lighting conditions and privacy concerns. One possibility to overcome these vulnerabilities is to resort to different modalities. For instance, thermal is particularly adept at accentuating human forms, while depth adds crucial contextual layers. Despite their known benefits, only a few HBA-specific datasets that integrate these modalities exist. To address this shortage, our research introduces a novel generative technique for creating trimodal, i.e., RGB, thermal, and depth, human-focused datasets. This technique capitalizes on human segmentation masks derived from RGB images, combined with thermal and depth backgrounds that are sourced automatically. With these two ingredients, we synthesize depth and thermal counterparts from existing RGB data utilizing conditional image-to-image translation. By employing this approach, we generate trimodal data that can be leveraged to train models for settings with limited data, bad lightning conditions, or privacy-sensitive areas.
In reinforcement learning (RL), different rewards can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the task efficiently. Choosing a good reward function is hence an extremely important yet challenging problem. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach to using rewards for learning. We introduce max-reward RL, where an agent optimizes the maximum rather than the cumulative reward. Unlike earlier works, our approach works for deterministic and stochastic environments and can be easily combined with state-of-the-art RL algorithms. In the experiments, we study the performance of max-reward RL algorithms in two goal-reaching environments from Gymnasium-Robotics and demonstrate its benefits over standard RL. The code is publicly available.
Distributed learning is an effective approach to accelerate model training using multiple workers. However, substantial communication delays emerge between workers and a parameter server due to massive costs associated with communicating gradients. SignSGD with majority voting (signSGD-MV) is a simple yet effective optimizer that reduces communication costs through one-bit quantization, yet the convergence rates considerably decrease as adversarial workers increase. In this paper, we show that the convergence rate is invariant as the number of adversarial workers increases, provided that the number of adversarial workers is smaller than that of benign workers. The key idea showing this counter-intuitive result is our novel signSGD with federated defense (signSGD-FD). Unlike the traditional approaches, signSGD-FD exploits the gradient information sent by adversarial workers with the proper weights, which are obtained through gradient sign decoding. Experimental results demonstrate signSGD-FD achieves superior convergence rates over traditional algorithms in various adversarial attack scenarios.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
In structure learning, the output is generally a structure that is used as supervision information to achieve good performance. Considering the interpretation of deep learning models has raised extended attention these years, it will be beneficial if we can learn an interpretable structure from deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) whose inner mechanism is still not clearly understood. We find that Finite State Automaton (FSA) that processes sequential data has more interpretable inner mechanism and can be learned from RNNs as the interpretable structure. We propose two methods to learn FSA from RNN based on two different clustering methods. We first give the graphical illustration of FSA for human beings to follow, which shows the interpretability. From the FSA's point of view, we then analyze how the performance of RNNs are affected by the number of gates, as well as the semantic meaning behind the transition of numerical hidden states. Our results suggest that RNNs with simple gated structure such as Minimal Gated Unit (MGU) is more desirable and the transitions in FSA leading to specific classification result are associated with corresponding words which are understandable by human beings.