After decades of extravagant promises and frustrating disappointments, artificial intelligence (AI) is finally starting to deliver real-life benefits to early-adopting companies. Retailers on the digital frontier rely on AI-powered robots to run their warehouses--and even to automatically order stock when inventory runs low. Utilities use AI to forecast electricity demand. A confluence of developments is driving this new wave of AI development. Computer power is growing, algorithms and AI models are becoming more sophisticated, and, perhaps most important of all, the world is generating once-unimaginable volumes of the fuel that powers AI--data.

Recently, several studies have proven the global convergence and generalization abilities of the gradient descent method for two-layer ReLU networks by making a positivity assumption of the Gram-matrix of the neural tangent kernel. However, the performance of gradient descent on classification problems has not been well studied, and further investigation of the problem structure is possible. In this work, we present a partially stronger but reasonable assumption for binary classification problems compared to the positivity assumption of the Gram-matrix, where a data distribution can be perfectly classifiable by a tangent model, and we provide a refined generalization analysis of the gradient descent method for two-layer networks with smooth activations. A remarkable point of this study is that our generalization bound has much better dependence on the network width compared to existing results. As a result, our theory significantly enlarges a class of over-parameterized networks having provable generalization ability, with respect to network width, while most studies require much higher over-parameterization.

One of the biggest challenges in robotics systems is interacting under uncertainty. Unlike robots, humans learn, adapt and perceive their body as a unity when interacting with the world. We hypothesize that the nervous system counteracts sensor and motor uncertainties by unconscious processes that robustly fuse the available information for approximating their body and the world state. Being able to unite perception and action under a common principle has been sought for decades and active inference is one of the potential unification theories. In this work, we present a humanoid robot interacting with the world by means of a human brain-like inspired perception and control algorithm based on the free-energy principle. Until now, active inference was only tested in simulated examples. Their application on a real robot shows the advantages of such an algorithm for real world applications. The humanoid robot iCub was capable of performing robust reaching behaviors with both arms and active head object tracking in the visual field, despite the visual noise, the artificially introduced noise in the joint encoders (up to 40 degrees deviation), the differences between the model and the real robot and the misdetections of the hand.

We propose a scalable framework for inference in an inhomogeneous Poisson process modeled by a continuous sigmoidal Cox process that assumes the corresponding intensity function is given by a Gaussian process (GP) prior transformed with a scaled logistic sigmoid function. We present a tractable representation of the likelihood through augmentation with a superposition of Poisson processes. This view enables a structured variational approximation capturing dependencies across variables in the model. Our framework avoids discretization of the domain, does not require accurate numerical integration over the input space and is not limited to GPs with squared exponential kernels. We evaluate our approach on synthetic and real-world data showing that its benefits are particularly pronounced on multivariate input settings where it overcomes the limitations of mean-field methods and sampling schemes. We provide the state of-the-art in terms of speed, accuracy and uncertainty quantification trade-offs.

General purpose relation extractors, which can model arbitrary relations, are a core aspiration in information extraction. Efforts have been made to build general purpose extractors that represent relations with their surface forms, or which jointly embed surface forms with relations from an existing knowledge graph. However, both of these approaches are limited in their ability to generalize. In this paper, we build on extensions of Harris' distributional hypothesis to relations, as well as recent advances in learning text representations (specifically, BERT), to build task agnostic relation representations solely from entity-linked text. We show that these representations significantly outperform previous work on exemplar based relation extraction (FewRel) even without using any of that task's training data. We also show that models initialized with our task agnostic representations, and then tuned on supervised relation extraction datasets, significantly outperform the previous methods on SemEval 2010 Task 8, KBP37, and TACRED.

In this paper, we empirically investigate applying word-level weights to adapt neural machine translation to e-commerce domains, where small e-commerce datasets and large out-of-domain datasets are available. In order to mine in-domain like words in the out-of-domain datasets, we compute word weights by using a domain-specific and a non-domain-specific language model followed by smoothing and binary quantization. The baseline model is trained on mixed in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. Experimental results on English to Chinese e-commerce domain translation show that compared to continuing training without word weights, it improves MT quality by up to 2.11% BLEU absolute and 1.59% TER. We have also trained models using fine-tuning on the in-domain data. Pre-training a model with word weights improves fine-tuning up to 1.24% BLEU absolute and 1.64% TER, respectively.

Consider a discrete-time Markovian decision process (MDP) where a decision-maker (DM) interacts with a system iteratively: in each round, the DM first observes the current state of the system, and then picks an available action. Afterwards, it receives an instant random reward, and the system transits to the next state according to some state transition distribution. The reward distribution and the state transition distribution depend on the current state and the chosen action, but are independent of all the previous states and actions. The goal of the DM is to maximize its cumulative rewards under the following challenges: - Uncertainty: the reward and the state transition distributions are initially unknown to the DM. - Non-stationarity: the environment is non-stationary, and both of the reward distributions and the state transition distributions can evolve over time.

To provide more accurate, diverse, and explainable recommendation, it is compulsory to go beyond modeling user-item interactions and take side information into account. Traditional methods like factorization machine (FM) cast it as a supervised learning problem, which assumes each interaction as an independent instance with side information encoded. Due to the overlook of the relations among instances or items (e.g., the director of a movie is also an actor of another movie), these methods are insufficient to distill the collaborative signal from the collective behaviors of users. In this work, we investigate the utility of knowledge graph (KG), which breaks down the independent interaction assumption by linking items with their attributes. We argue that in such a hybrid structure of KG and user-item graph, high-order relations --- which connect two items with one or multiple linked attributes --- are an essential factor for successful recommendation. We propose a new method named Knowledge Graph Attention Network (KGAT) which explicitly models the high-order connectivities in KG in an end-to-end fashion. It recursively propagates the embeddings from a node's neighbors (which can be users, items, or attributes) to refine the node's embedding, and employs an attention mechanism to discriminate the importance of the neighbors. Our KGAT is conceptually advantageous to existing KG-based recommendation methods, which either exploit high-order relations by extracting paths or implicitly modeling them with regularization. Empirical results on three public benchmarks show that KGAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods like Neural FM and RippleNet. Further studies verify the efficacy of embedding propagation for high-order relation modeling and the interpretability benefits brought by the attention mechanism.

Human learners have the natural ability to use knowledge gained in one setting for learning in a different but related setting. This ability to transfer knowledge from one task to another is essential for effective learning. In this paper, we study transfer learning in the context of nonparametric classification based on observations from different distributions under the posterior drift model, which is a general framework and arises in many practical problems. We first establish the minimax rate of convergence and construct a rate-optimal two-sample weighted $K$-NN classifier. The results characterize precisely the contribution of the observations from the source distribution to the classification task under the target distribution. A data-driven adaptive classifier is then proposed and is shown to simultaneously attain within a logarithmic factor of the optimal rate over a large collection of parameter spaces. Simulation studies and real data applications are carried out where the numerical results further illustrate the theoretical analysis. Extensions to the case of multiple source distributions are also considered.

We propose the use of a proportional-derivative (PD) control based policy learned via reinforcement learning (RL) to estimate and forecast 3D human pose from egocentric videos. The method learns directly from unsegmented egocentric videos and motion capture data consisting of various complex human motions (e.g., crouching, hopping, bending, and motion transitions). We propose a video-conditioned recurrent control technique to forecast physically-valid and stable future motions of arbitrary length. We also introduce a value function based fail-safe mechanism which enables our method to run as a single pass algorithm over the video data. Experiments with both controlled and in-the-wild data show that our approach outperforms previous art in both quantitative metrics and visual quality of the motions, and is also robust enough to transfer directly to real-world scenarios. Additionally, our time analysis shows that the combined use of our pose estimation and forecasting can run at 30 FPS, making it suitable for real-time applications.