Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Île-de-France



WFCRL: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Wind Farm Control

Neural Information Processing Systems

The wind farm control problem is challenging, since conventional model-based control strategies require tractable models of complex aerodynamical interactions between the turbines and suffer from the curse of dimension when the number of turbines increases. Recently, model-free and multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches have been used to address this challenge. In this article, we introduce WFCRL (Wind Farm Control with Reinforcement Learning), the first open suite of multi-agent reinforcement learning environments for the wind farm control problem. WFCRL frames a cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problem: each turbine is an agent and can learn to adjust its yaw, pitch or torque to maximize the common objective (e.g. the total power production of the farm). WFCRL also offers turbine load observations that will allow to optimize the farm performance while limiting turbine structural damages. Interfaces with two state-of-the-art farm simulators are implemented in WFCRL: a static simulator (FLORIS) and a dynamic simulator (FAST.Farm). For each simulator, 10 wind layouts are provided, including 5 real wind farms. Two state-of-the-art online MARL algorithms are implemented to illustrate the scaling challenges. As learning online on FAST.Farm is highly time-consuming, WFCRL offers the possibility of designing transfer learning strategies from FLORIS to FAST.Farm.


Local Differential Privacy for Regret Minimization in Reinforcement Learning Vianney Perchet Facebook AI Research & CREST, ENSAE CREST, ENSAE Paris & Criteo AI Lab Paris, France

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement learning algorithms are widely used in domains where it is desirable to provide a personalized service. In these domains it is common that user data contains sensitive information that needs to be protected from third parties. Motivated by this, we study privacy in the context of finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) by requiring information to be obfuscated on the user side. We formulate this notion of privacy for RL by leveraging the local differential privacy (LDP) framework. We establish a lower bound for regret minimization in finite-horizon MDPs with LDP guarantees which shows that guaranteeing privacy has a multiplicative effect on the regret. This result shows that while LDP is an appealing notion of privacy, it makes the learning problem significantly more complex. Finally, we present an optimistic algorithm that simultaneously satisfies ε-LDP requirements, and achieves K/ε regret in any finite-horizon MDP after K episodes, matching the lower bound dependency on the number of episodes K.


Mixed precision accumulation for neural network inference guided by componentwise forward error analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mixed precision accumulation for neural network inference guided by componentwise forward error analysis El-Mehdi El arar 1, Silviu-Ioan Filip 1, Theo Mary 2, and Elisa Riccietti 3 1 Inria, IRISA, Universit e de Rennes, 263 Av. G en eral Leclerc, F-35000, Rennes, France 2 Sorbonne Universit e, CNRS, LIP6, 4 Place Jussieu, F-75005, Paris, France 3 ENS de Lyon, CNRS, Inria, Universit e Claude Bernard Lyon 1 LIP, UMR 5668, 69342, Lyon cedex 07, France Abstract This work proposes a mathematically founded mixed precision accumulation strategy for the inference of neural networks. Our strategy is based on a new componentwise forward error analysis that explains the propagation of errors in the forward pass of neural networks. Specifically, our analysis shows that the error in each component of the output of a layer is proportional to the condition number of the inner product between the weights and the input, multiplied by the condition number of the activation function. These condition numbers can vary widely from one component to the other, thus creating a significant opportunity to introduce mixed precision: each component should be accumulated in a precision inversely proportional to the product of these condition numbers. We propose a practical algorithm that exploits this observation: it first computes all components in low precision, uses this output to estimate the condition numbers, and recomputes in higher precision only the components associated with large condition numbers. We test our algorithm on various networks and datasets and confirm experimentally that it can significantly improve the cost-accuracy tradeoff compared with uniform precision accumulation baselines. Keywords: Neural network, inference, error analysis, mixed precision, multiply-accumulate 1 Introduction Modern applications in artificial intelligence require increasingly complex models and thus increasing memory, time, and energy costs for storing and deploying large-scale deep learning models with parameter counts ranging in the millions and billions. This is a limiting factor both in the context of training and of inference. While the growing training costs can be tackled by the power of modern computing resources, notably GPU accelerators, the deployment of large-scale models leads to serious limitations in inference contexts with limited resources, such as embedded systems or applications that require real-time processing.


Non-asymptotic Analysis of Biased Adaptive Stochastic Approximation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in several recent deep learning and reinforcement learning applications that use Monte Carlo methods. This paper provides a comprehensive non-asymptotic analysis of SGD with biased gradients and adaptive steps for non-convex smooth functions. Our study incorporates time-dependent bias and emphasizes the importance of controlling the bias of the gradient estimator. In particular, we establish that Adagrad, RMSProp, and AMSGRAD, an exponential moving average variant of Adam, with biased gradients, converge to critical points for smooth non-convex functions at a rate similar to existing results in the literature for the unbiased case. Finally, we provide experimental results using Variational Autoenconders (VAE) and applications to several learning frameworks that illustrate our convergence results and show how the effect of bias can be reduced by appropriate hyperparameter tuning.


Reconstruction of muon bundles in KM3NeT detectors using machine learning methods

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The KM3NeT Collaboration is installing the ARCA and ORCA neutrino detectors at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The focus of ARCA is neutrino astronomy, while ORCA is optimised for neutrino oscillation studies. Both detectors are already operational in their intermediate states and collect valuable data, including the measurements of the muons produced by cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere. This work explores the potential of machine learning models for the reconstruction of muon bundles, which are multi-muon events. For this, data collected with intermediate detector configurations of ARCA and ORCA was used in addition to simulated data from the envisaged final configurations of those detectors. Prediction of the total number of muons in a bundle as well as their total energy and even the energy of the primary cosmic ray is presented.


A Survey of Adversarial Defenses in Vision-based Systems: Categorization, Methods and Challenges

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Adversarial attacks have emerged as a major challenge to the trustworthy deployment of machine learning models, particularly in computer vision applications. These attacks have a varied level of potency and can be implemented in both white box and black box approaches. Practical attacks include methods to manipulate the physical world and enforce adversarial behaviour by the corresponding target neural network models. Multiple different approaches to mitigate different kinds of such attacks are available in the literature, each with their own advantages and limitations. In this survey, we present a comprehensive systematization of knowledge on adversarial defenses, focusing on two key computer vision tasks: image classification and object detection. We review the state-of-the-art adversarial defense techniques and categorize them for easier comparison. In addition, we provide a schematic representation of these categories within the context of the overall machine learning pipeline, facilitating clearer understanding and benchmarking of defenses. Furthermore, we map these defenses to the types of adversarial attacks and datasets where they are most effective, offering practical insights for researchers and practitioners. This study is necessary for understanding the scope of how the available defenses are able to address the adversarial threats, and their shortcomings as well, which is necessary for driving the research in this area in the most appropriate direction, with the aim of building trustworthy AI systems for regular practical use-cases.


Identifiable Multi-View Causal Discovery Without Non-Gaussianity

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We propose a novel approach to linear causal discovery in the framework of multi-view Structural Equation Models (SEM). Our proposed model relaxes the well-known assumption of non-Gaussian disturbances by alternatively assuming diversity of variances over views, making it more broadly applicable. We prove the identifiability of all the parameters of the model without any further assumptions on the structure of the SEM other than it being acyclic. We further propose an estimation algorithm based on recent advances in multi-view Independent Component Analysis (ICA). The proposed methodology is validated through simulations and application on real neuroimaging data, where it enables the estimation of causal graphs between brain regions.


Fox News AI Newsletter: VP calls for ideology-free AI

FOX News

Gladstone A.I. co-founders and CEOs Edouard Harris and Jeremie Harris explain the major role that A.I will play in national security and warfare on'The Will Cain Show.' Vice President JD Vance will attend an AI summit in Paris, France, a French official said anonymously. FREE FROM BIAS: Vice President JD Vance told world leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the United States intends to remain the dominant force in artificial intelligence and warned that the European Union's far tougher regulatory approach to the technology could cripple it. 'TRYING TO SLOW US DOWN': OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Elon Musk is "probably just trying to slow us down" with his bid to purchase the company, insisting on Tuesday that it is not for sale. 'MASS SURVEILLANCE': OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts that artificial general intelligence will lead to lower costs for many goods, but has also warned that AI could be leveraged by authoritarian governments aiming to control people. TRANSLATED TRUTH: Whether you have an iPhone or an Android, these apps have got you covered with features like live speech translation, text input and even AI-powered sign and menu translation.