A language for specifying complex reinforcement learning tasks.
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In artificial intelligence, we often specify tasks through a reward function. While this works well in some settings, many tasks are hard to specify this way. In deep reinforcement learning, for example, directly specifying a reward as a function of a high-dimensional observation is challenging. Instead, we present an …
Biological intelligence can learn to solve many diverse tasks in a data efficient manner by re-using basic knowledge and skills from one task to another. Furthermore, many of such skills are acquired without explicit supervision in an intrinsically driven fashion. This is in contrast to the state-of-the-art reinforceme…
We present a method to generate directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) using deep reinforcement learning, specifically deep Q-learning. Generating graphs with specified structures is an important and challenging task in various application fields, however most current graph generation methods produce graphs with undirected edg…
Reasoning about graphs evolving over time is a challenging concept in many domains, such as bioinformatics, physics, and social networks. We consider a common case in which edges can be short term interactions (e.g., messaging) or long term structural connections (e.g., friendship). In practice, long term edges are oft…
We propose a technique for declaratively specifying strategies for semi-supervised learning (SSL). The proposed method can be used to specify ensembles of semi-supervised learning, as well as agreement constraints and entropic regularization constraints between these learners, and can be used to model both well-known h…
Stochastic variational inference for Bayesian deep neural network (DNN) requires specifying priors and approximate posterior distributions over neural network weights. Specifying meaningful weight priors is a challenging problem, particularly for scaling variational inference to deeper architectures involving high dime…
The Jacobian-based Saliency Map Attack is a family of adversarial attack methods for fooling classification models, such as deep neural networks for image classification tasks. By saturating a few pixels in a given image to their maximum or minimum values, JSMA can cause the model to misclassify the resulting adversari…
We present an algorithm, Decision-Directed Data Decomposition (D4), which decomposes a dataset into two components. The first contains most of the useful information for a specified supervised learning task. The second orthogonal component contains little information about the task but retains associations and informat…
Many real world learning tasks involve complex or hard-to-specify objectives, and using an easier-to-specify proxy can lead to poor performance or misaligned behavior. One solution is to have humans provide a training signal by demonstrating or judging performance, but this approach fails if the task is too complicated…
ExpBERT uses natural language explanations to improve text interpretation.
New method learns shared structures in non-linear tasks.
Typical reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to complete tasks specified by reward functions tailored to their domain. As such, the policies they learn do not generalize even to similar domains. To address this issue, we develop a framework through which a deep RL agent learns to generalize policies from smaller, s…
We conduct an empirical study of machine learning functionalities provided by major cloud service providers, which we call machine learning clouds. Machine learning clouds hold the promise of hiding all the sophistication of running large-scale machine learning: Instead of specifying how to run a machine learning task,…
With the advent of kernel methods, automating the task of specifying a suitable kernel has become increasingly important. In this context, the Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) problem of finding a combination of pre-specified base kernels that is suitable for the task at hand has received significant attention from resea…
The paper develops methods to predict the probability of achieving a user goal in a task, ensuring the system alerts when the probability falls below a threshold.
Data augmentation is a ubiquitous technique for increasing the size of labeled training sets by leveraging task-specific data transformations that preserve class labels. While it is often easy for domain experts to specify individual transformations, constructing and tuning the more sophisticated compositions typically…
CIfly simplifies causal inference tasks with linear-time reachability primitives.
A key challenge in complex visuomotor control is learning abstract representations that are effective for specifying goals, planning, and generalization. To this end, we introduce universal planning networks (UPN). UPNs embed differentiable planning within a goal-directed policy. This planning computation unrolls a for…
Imitation Learning (IL) is an appealing approach to learn desirable autonomous behavior. However, directing IL to achieve arbitrary goals is difficult. In contrast, planning-based algorithms use dynamics models and reward functions to achieve goals. Yet, reward functions that evoke desirable behavior are often difficul…
The standard reinforcement learning (RL) formulation considers the expectation of the (discounted) cumulative reward. This is limiting in applications where we are concerned with not only the expected performance, but also the distribution of the performance. In this paper, we introduce micro-objective reinforcement le…
Reinforcement learning and planning methods require an objective or reward function that encodes the desired behavior. Yet, in practice, there is a wide range of scenarios where an objective is difficult to provide programmatically, such as tasks with visual observations involving unknown object positions or deformable…
In this paper, we treat the image generation task using an autoencoder, a representative latent model. Unlike many studies regularizing the latent variable's distribution by assuming a manually specified prior, we approach the image generation task using an autoencoder by directly estimating the latent distribution. To…
Reinforcement learning requires manual specification of a reward function to learn a task. While in principle this reward function only needs to specify the task goal, in practice reinforcement learning can be very time-consuming or even infeasible unless the reward function is shaped so as to provide a smooth gradient…
This paper proves the theoretical advantage of unsupervised pretraining for machine learning tasks.
Neural density estimators are flexible families of parametric models which have seen widespread use in unsupervised machine learning in recent years. Maximum-likelihood training typically dictates that these models be constrained to specify an explicit density. However, this limitation can be overcome by instead using …
We generalise the problem of inverse reinforcement learning to multiple tasks, from multiple demonstrations. Each one may represent one expert trying to solve a different task, or as different experts trying to solve the same task. Our main contribution is to formalise the problem as statistical preference elicitation,…
Dynamical system models (including RNNs) often lack the ability to adapt the sequence generation or prediction to a given context, limiting their real-world application. In this paper we show that hierarchical multi-task dynamical systems (MTDSs) provide direct user control over sequence generation, via use of a latent…
Traditionally, multitask learning (MTL) assumes that all the tasks are related. This can lead to negative transfer when tasks are indeed incoherent. Recently, a number of approaches have been proposed that alleviate this problem by discovering the underlying task clusters or relationships. However, they are limited to …
Deep neural networks and decision trees operate on largely separate paradigms; typically, the former performs representation learning with pre-specified architectures, while the latter is characterised by learning hierarchies over pre-specified features with data-driven architectures. We unite the two via adaptive neur…
Cyber-physical systems, such as mobile robots, must respond adaptively to dynamic operating conditions. Effective operation of these systems requires that sensing and actuation tasks are performed in a timely manner. Additionally, execution of mission specific tasks such as imaging a room must be balanced against the n…
Using reinforcement learning to learn control policies is a challenge when the task is complex with potentially long horizons. Ensuring adequate but safe exploration is also crucial for controlling physical systems. In this paper, we use temporal logic to facilitate specification and learning of complex tasks. We combi…
The paper proposes a method to reliably select design algorithms for machine learning-guided design tasks.
Proposes Neural Complexity (NC) for predicting and explaining generalization in deep neural networks.
We study the relationship between catastrophic forgetting and properties of task sequences. In particular, given a sequence of tasks, we would like to understand which properties of this sequence influence the error rates of continual learning algorithms trained on the sequence. To this end, we propose a new procedure …
We present sparse tree-based and list-based density estimation methods for binary/categorical data. Our density estimation models are higher dimensional analogies to variable bin width histograms. In each leaf of the tree (or list), the density is constant, similar to the flat density within the bin of a histogram. His…
The combination of deep neural network models and reinforcement learning algorithms can make it possible to learn policies for robotic behaviors that directly read in raw sensory inputs, such as camera images, effectively subsuming both estimation and control into one model. However, real-world applications of reinforc…
This work provides guarantees for off-policy function estimation under realizability assumptions.
Generating paraphrases that are lexically similar but semantically different is a challenging task. Paraphrases of this form can be used to augment data sets for various NLP tasks such as machine reading comprehension and question answering with non-trivial negative examples. In this article, we propose a deep variatio…
A central goal of unsupervised learning is to acquire representations from unlabeled data or experience that can be used for more effective learning of downstream tasks from modest amounts of labeled data. Many prior unsupervised learning works aim to do so by developing proxy objectives based on reconstruction, disent…
Constraint-based learning reduces the burden of collecting labels by having users specify general properties of structured outputs, such as constraints imposed by physical laws. We propose a novel framework for simultaneously learning these constraints and using them for supervision, bypassing the difficulty of using d…
SHADOWCAST generates graphs with user-specified attributes.
Few-shot Learning aims to learn classifiers for new classes with only a few training examples per class. Existing meta-learning or metric-learning based few-shot learning approaches are limited in handling diverse domains with various number of labels. The meta-learning approaches train a meta learner to predict weight…
The paper provides conditions for realizing graphs and polytopes with specified edge lengths.
Optimizes machine learning models while controlling risks.
New algorithms bound treatment effects with unmeasured confounding.
In this paper, we proposed a deep learning-based end-to-end method on the domain specified automatic term extraction (ATE), it considers possible term spans within a fixed length in the sentence and predicts them whether they can be conceptual terms. In comparison with current ATE methods, the model supports nested ter…
Approaches to continual learning aim to successfully learn a set of related tasks that arrive in an online manner. Recently, several frameworks have been developed which enable deep learning to be deployed in this learning scenario. A key modelling decision is to what extent the architecture should be shared across tas…