In a large E-commerce platform, all the participants compete for impressions under the allocation mechanism of the platform. Existing methods mainly focus on the short-term return based on the current observations instead of the long-term return. In this paper, we formally establish the lifecycle model for products, by defining the introduction, growth, maturity and decline stages and their transitions throughout the whole life period. Based on such model, we further propose a reinforcement learning based mechanism design framework for impression allocation, which incorporates the first principal component based permutation and the novel experiences generation method, to maximize short-term as well as long-term return of the platform. With the power of trial-and-error, it is possible to optimize impression allocation strategies globally which is contribute to the healthy development of participants and the platform itself. We evaluate our algorithm on a simulated environment built based on one of the largest E-commerce platforms, and a significant improvement has been achieved in comparison with the baseline solutions.

Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Abstract In the modern age, rankings data is ubiquitous and it is useful for a variety of applications such as recommender systems, multi-object tracking and preference learning. However, most rankings data encountered in the real world is incomplete, which forbids the direct application of existing modelling tools for complete rankings. Our contribution is a novel way to extend kernel methods for complete rankings to partial rankings, via consistent Monte Carlo estimators of Gram matrices. These Monte Carlo kernel estimators are based on extending kernel mean embeddings to the embedding of a set of full rankings consistent with an observed partial ranking. They form a computationally tractable alternative to previous approaches for partial rankings data. We also present a novel variance reduction scheme based on an antithetic variate construction between permutations to obtain an improved estimator. An overview of the existing kernels and metrics for permutations is also provided. Keywords Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space; Partial rankings; Monte Carlo; Antithetic variates; Gram matrix 1 Motivation Permutations play a fundamental role in statistical modelling and machine learning applications involving rank-M.

Real-world data such as digital images, MRI scans and electroencephalography signals are naturally represented as matrices with structural information. Most existing classifiers aim to capture these structures by regularizing the regression matrix to be low-rank or sparse. Some other methodologies introduce factorization technique to explore nonlinear relationships of matrix data in kernel space. In this paper, we propose a multi-distance support matrix machine (MDSMM), which provides a principled way of solving matrix classification problems. The multi-distance is introduced to capture the correlation within matrix data, by means of intrinsic information in rows and columns of input data. A complex hyperplane is established upon these values to separate distinct classes. We further study the generalization bounds for i.i.d. processes and non i.i.d. process based on both SVM and SMM classifiers. For typical hypothesis classes where matrix norms are constrained, MDSMM achieves a faster learning rate than traditional classifiers. We also provide a more general approach for samples without prior knowledge. We demonstrate the merits of the proposed method by conducting exhaustive experiments on both simulation study and a number of real-word datasets.

Generating sequential decision process from huge amounts of measured process data is a future research direction for collaborative factory automation, making full use of those online or offline process data to directly design flexible make decisions policy, and evaluate performance. The key challenges for the sequential decision process is to online generate sequential decision-making policy directly, and transferring knowledge across tasks domain. Most multi-task policy generating algorithms often suffer from insufficient generating cross-task sharing structure at discrete-time nonlinear systems with applications. This paper proposes the multi-task generative adversarial nets with shared memory for cross-domain coordination control, which can generate sequential decision policy directly from raw sensory input of all of tasks, and online evaluate performance of system actions in discrete-time nonlinear systems. Experiments have been undertaken using a professional flexible manufacturing testbed deployed within a smart factory of Weichai Power in China. Results on three groups of discrete-time nonlinear control tasks show that our proposed model can availably improve the performance of task with the help of other related tasks.

No methods currently exist for making arbitrary neural networks fair. In this work we introduce GRAD, a new and simplified method to producing fair neural networks that can be used for auto-encoding fair representations or directly with predictive networks. It is easy to implement and add to existing architectures, has only one (insensitive) hyper-parameter, and provides improved individual and group fairness. We use the flexibility of GRAD to demonstrate multi-attribute protection.

Though deep neural networks have great success in natural language processing, they are limited at more knowledge intensive AI tasks, such as open-domain Question Answering (QA). Existing end-to-end deep QA models need to process the entire text after observing the question, and therefore their complexity in responding a question is linear in the text size. This is prohibitive for practical tasks such as QA from Wikipedia, a novel, or the Web. We propose to solve this scalability issue by using symbolic meaning representations, which can be indexed and retrieved efficiently with complexity that is independent of the text size. We apply our approach, called the N-Gram Machine (NGM), to three representative tasks. First as proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that NGM successfully solves the bAbI tasks of synthetic text. Second, we show that NGM scales to large corpus by experimenting on "life-long bAbI", a special version of bAbI that contains millions of sentences. Lastly on the WikiMovies dataset, we use NGM to induce latent structure (i.e. schema) and answer questions from natural language Wikipedia text, with only QA pairs as weak supervision.

We demonstrate the first application of deep reinforcement learning to autonomous driving. From randomly initialised parameters, our model is able to learn a policy for lane following in a handful of training episodes using a single monocular image as input. We provide a general and easy to obtain reward: the distance travelled by the vehicle without the safety driver taking control. We use a continuous, model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithm, with all exploration and optimisation performed on-vehicle. This demonstrates a new framework for autonomous driving which moves away from reliance on defined logical rules, mapping, and direct supervision. We discuss the challenges and opportunities to scale this approach to a broader range of autonomous driving tasks.

Deep reinforcement learning has led to several recent breakthroughs, though the learned policies are often based on black-box neural networks. This makes them difficult to interpret and to impose desired specification constraints during learning. We present an iterative framework, MORL, for improving the learned policies using program synthesis. Concretely, we propose to use synthesis techniques to obtain a symbolic representation of the learned policy, which can then be debugged manually or automatically using program repair. After the repair step, we use behavior cloning to obtain the policy corresponding to the repaired program, which is then further improved using gradient descent. This process continues until the learned policy satisfies desired constraints. We instantiate MORL for the simple CartPole problem and show that the programmatic representation allows for high-level modifications that in turn lead to improved learning of the policies.

Predictive analysis in business process monitoring aims at forecasting the future information of a running business process. The prediction is typically made based on the model extracted from historical process execution logs (event logs). In practice, different business domains might require different kinds of predictions. Hence, it is important to have a means for properly specifying the desired prediction tasks, and a mechanism to deal with these various prediction tasks. Although there have been many studies in this area, they mostly focus on a specific prediction task. This work introduces a language for specifying the desired prediction tasks, and this language allows us to express various kinds of prediction tasks. This work also presents a mechanism for automatically creating the corresponding prediction model based on the given specification. Thus, different from previous studies, our approach enables us to deal with various kinds of prediction tasks based on the given specification. A prototype implementing our approach has been developed and experiments using a real-life event log have been conducted.

Back in the 1990s we started work on pedagogical agents, a new user interface paradigm for interactive learning environments. Pedagogical agents are autonomous characters that inhabit learning environments and can engage with learners in rich, face-to-face interactions. Building on this work, in 2000 we, together with our colleague, Jeff Rickel, published an article on pedagogical agents that surveyed this new paradigm and discussed its potential. We made the case that pedagogical agents that interact with learners in natural, life-like ways can help learning environments achieve improved learning outcomes. This article has been widely cited, and was a winner of the 2017 IFAAMAS Award for Influential Papers in Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS, 2017). On the occasion of receiving the IFAAMAS award, and after twenty years of work on pedagogical agents, we decided to take another look at the future of the field. We’ll start by revisiting our predictions for pedagogical agents back in 2000, and examine which of those predictions panned out. Then, informed what we have learned since then, we will take another look at emerging trends and the future of pedagogical agents. Advances in natural language dialogue, affective computing, machine learning, virtual environments, and robotics are making possible even more lifelike and effective pedagogical agents, with potentially profound effects on the way people learn.