In economic theory, an agent chooses from available alternatives -- modeled as a set. In decisions in the field or in the lab, however, agents do not have access to the set of alternatives at once. Instead, alternatives are represented by the outside world in a structured way. Online search results are lists of items, wine menus are often lists of lists (grouped by type or country), and online shopping often involves filtering items which can be viewed as navigating a tree. Representations constrain how an agent can choose. At the same time, an agent can also leverage representations when choosing, simplifying his/her choice process. For instance, in the case of a list he or she can use the order in which alternatives are represented to make his/her choice. In this paper, we model representations and decision procedures operating on them. We show that choice procedures are related to classical choice functions by a canonical mapping. Using this mapping, we can ask whether properties of choice functions can be lifted onto the choice procedures which induce them. We focus on the obvious benchmark: rational choice. We fully characterize choice procedures which can be rationalized by a strict preference relation for general representations including lists, list of lists, trees and others. Our framework can thereby be used as the basis for new tests of rational behavior. Classical choice theory operates on very limited information, typically budgets or menus and final choices. This is in stark contrast to the vast amount of data that specifically web companies collect about their users' choice process. Our framework offers a way to integrate such data into economic choice models.
During recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has made successful incursions into complex decision-making applications such as robotics, autonomous driving or video games. In the search for more sample-efficient algorithms, a promising direction is to leverage as much external off-policy data as possible. One staple of this data-driven approach is to learn from expert demonstrations. In the past, multiple ideas have been proposed to make good use of the demonstrations added to the replay buffer, such as pretraining on demonstrations only or minimizing additional cost functions. We present a new method, able to leverage demonstrations and episodes collected online in any sparse-reward environment with any off-policy algorithm. Our method is based on a reward bonus given to demonstrations and successful episodes, encouraging expert imitation and self-imitation. First, we give a reward bonus to the transitions coming from demonstrations to encourage the agent to match the demonstrated behaviour. Then, upon collecting a successful episode, we relabel its transitions with the same bonus before adding them to the replay buffer, encouraging the agent to also match its previous successes. Our experiments focus on manipulation robotics, specifically on three tasks for a 6 degrees-of-freedom robotic arm in simulation. We show that our method based on reward relabeling improves the performance of the base algorithm (SAC and DDPG) on these tasks, even in the absence of demonstrations. Furthermore, integrating into our method two improvements from previous works allows our approach to outperform all baselines.
Local explainability methods -- those which seek to generate an explanation for each prediction -- are becoming increasingly prevalent due to the need for practitioners to rationalize their model outputs. However, comparing local explainability methods is difficult since they each generate outputs in various scales and dimensions. Furthermore, due to the stochastic nature of some explainability methods, it is possible for different runs of a method to produce contradictory explanations for a given observation. In this paper, we propose a topology-based framework to extract a simplified representation from a set of local explanations. We do so by first modeling the relationship between the explanation space and the model predictions as a scalar function. Then, we compute the topological skeleton of this function. This topological skeleton acts as a signature for such functions, which we use to compare different explanation methods. We demonstrate that our framework can not only reliably identify differences between explainability techniques but also provides stable representations. Then, we show how our framework can be used to identify appropriate parameters for local explainability methods. Our framework is simple, does not require complex optimizations, and can be broadly applied to most local explanation methods. We believe the practicality and versatility of our approach will help promote topology-based approaches as a tool for understanding and comparing explanation methods.
This work studies the question of Representation Learning in RL: how can we learn a compact low-dimensional representation such that on top of the representation we can perform RL procedures such as exploration and exploitation, in a sample efficient manner. We focus on the low-rank Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the transition dynamics correspond to a low-rank transition matrix. Unlike prior works that assume the representation is known (e.g., linear MDPs), here we need to learn the representation for the low-rank MDP. We study both the online RL and offline RL settings. For the online setting, operating with the same computational oracles used in FLAMBE (Agarwal et.al), the state-of-art algorithm for learning representations in low-rank MDPs, we propose an algorithm REP-UCB Upper Confidence Bound driven Representation learning for RL), which significantly improves the sample complexity from $\widetilde{O}( A^9 d^7 / (\epsilon^{10} (1-\gamma)^{22}))$ for FLAMBE to $\widetilde{O}( A^2 d^4 / (\epsilon^2 (1-\gamma)^{5}) )$ with $d$ being the rank of the transition matrix (or dimension of the ground truth representation), $A$ being the number of actions, and $\gamma$ being the discounted factor. Notably, REP-UCB is simpler than FLAMBE, as it directly balances the interplay between representation learning, exploration, and exploitation, while FLAMBE is an explore-then-commit style approach and has to perform reward-free exploration step-by-step forward in time. For the offline RL setting, we develop an algorithm that leverages pessimism to learn under a partial coverage condition: our algorithm is able to compete against any policy as long as it is covered by the offline distribution.
We develop a theoretical analysis for special neural network architectures, termed operator recurrent neural networks, for approximating nonlinear functions whose inputs are linear operators. Such functions commonly arise in solution algorithms for inverse boundary value problems. Traditional neural networks treat input data as vectors, and thus they do not effectively capture the multiplicative structure associated with the linear operators that correspond to the data in such inverse problems. We therefore introduce a new family that resembles a standard neural network architecture, but where the input data acts multiplicatively on vectors. Motivated by compact operators appearing in boundary control and the analysis of inverse boundary value problems for the wave equation, we promote structure and sparsity in selected weight matrices in the network. After describing this architecture, we study its representation properties as well as its approximation properties. We furthermore show that an explicit regularization can be introduced that can be derived from the mathematical analysis of the mentioned inverse problems, and which leads to certain guarantees on the generalization properties. We observe that the sparsity of the weight matrices improves the generalization estimates. Lastly, we discuss how operator recurrent networks can be viewed as a deep learning analogue to deterministic algorithms such as boundary control for reconstructing the unknown wavespeed in the acoustic wave equation from boundary measurements.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
We propose a novel approach to disentangle the generative factors of variation underlying a given set of observations. Our method builds upon the idea that the (unknown) low-dimensional manifold underlying the data space can be explicitly modeled as a product of submanifolds. This gives rise to a new definition of disentanglement, and to a novel weakly-supervised algorithm for recovering the unknown explanatory factors behind the data. At training time, our algorithm only requires pairs of non i.i.d. data samples whose elements share at least one, possibly multidimensional, generative factor of variation. We require no knowledge on the nature of these transformations, and do not make any limiting assumption on the properties of each subspace. Our approach is easy to implement, and can be successfully applied to different kinds of data (from images to 3D surfaces) undergoing arbitrary transformations. In addition to standard synthetic benchmarks, we showcase our method in challenging real-world applications, where we compare favorably with the state of the art.
Seamlessly interacting with humans or robots is hard because these agents are non-stationary. They update their policy in response to the ego agent's behavior, and the ego agent must anticipate these changes to co-adapt. Inspired by humans, we recognize that robots do not need to explicitly model every low-level action another agent will make; instead, we can capture the latent strategy of other agents through high-level representations. We propose a reinforcement learning-based framework for learning latent representations of an agent's policy, where the ego agent identifies the relationship between its behavior and the other agent's future strategy. The ego agent then leverages these latent dynamics to influence the other agent, purposely guiding them towards policies suitable for co-adaptation. Across several simulated domains and a real-world air hockey game, our approach outperforms the alternatives and learns to influence the other agent.
Fashion is a complex social phenomenon. People follow fashion styles from demonstrations by experts or fashion icons. However, for machine agent, learning to imitate fashion experts from demonstrations can be challenging, especially for complex styles in environments with high-dimensional, multimodal observations. Most existing research regarding fashion outfit composition utilizes supervised learning methods to mimic the behaviors of style icons. These methods suffer from distribution shift: because the agent greedily imitates some given outfit demonstrations, it can drift away from one style to another styles given subtle differences. In this work, we propose an adversarial inverse reinforcement learning formulation to recover reward functions based on hierarchical multimodal representation (HM-AIRL) during the imitation process. The hierarchical joint representation can more comprehensively model the expert composited outfit demonstrations to recover the reward function. We demonstrate that the proposed HM-AIRL model is able to recover reward functions that are robust to changes in multimodal observations, enabling us to learn policies under significant variation between different styles.
Since deep neural networks were developed, they have made huge contributions to everyday lives. Machine learning provides more rational advice than humans are capable of in almost every aspect of daily life. However, despite this achievement, the design and training of neural networks are still challenging and unpredictable procedures. To lower the technical thresholds for common users, automated hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) has become a popular topic in both academic and industrial areas. This paper provides a review of the most essential topics on HPO. The first section introduces the key hyper-parameters related to model training and structure, and discusses their importance and methods to define the value range. Then, the research focuses on major optimization algorithms and their applicability, covering their efficiency and accuracy especially for deep learning networks. This study next reviews major services and toolkits for HPO, comparing their support for state-of-the-art searching algorithms, feasibility with major deep learning frameworks, and extensibility for new modules designed by users. The paper concludes with problems that exist when HPO is applied to deep learning, a comparison between optimization algorithms, and prominent approaches for model evaluation with limited computational resources.
Real-world applications often combine learning and optimization problems on graphs. For instance, our objective may be to cluster the graph in order to detect meaningful communities (or solve other common graph optimization problems such as facility location, maxcut, and so on). However, graphs or related attributes are often only partially observed, introducing learning problems such as link prediction which must be solved prior to optimization. We propose an approach to integrate a differentiable proxy for common graph optimization problems into training of machine learning models for tasks such as link prediction. This allows the model to focus specifically on the downstream task that its predictions will be used for. Experimental results show that our end-to-end system obtains better performance on example optimization tasks than can be obtained by combining state of the art link prediction methods with expert-designed graph optimization algorithms.