Victoria
Cycle-StarNet: Bridging the gap between theory and data by leveraging large datasets
O'Briain, Teaghan, Ting, Yuan-Sen, Fabbro, Sébastien, Yi, Kwang M., Venn, Kim, Bialek, Spencer
The advancements in stellar spectroscopy data acquisition have made it necessary to accomplish similar improvements in efficient data analysis techniques. Current automated methods for analyzing spectra are either (a) data-driven, which requires prior knowledge of stellar parameters and elemental abundances, or (b) based on theoretical synthetic models that are susceptible to the gap between theory and practice. In this study, we present a hybrid generative domain adaptation method that turns simulated stellar spectra into realistic spectra by applying unsupervised learning to large spectroscopic surveys. We apply our technique to the APOGEE H-band spectra at R=22,500 and the Kurucz synthetic models. As a proof of concept, two case studies are presented. The first of which is the calibration of synthetic data to become consistent with observations. To accomplish this, synthetic models are morphed into spectra that resemble observations, thereby reducing the gap between theory and observations. Fitting the observed spectra shows an improved average reduced $\chi_R^2$ from 1.97 to 1.22, along with a reduced mean residual from 0.16 to -0.01 in normalized flux. The second case study is the identification of the elemental source of missing spectral lines in the synthetic modelling. A mock dataset is used to show that absorption lines can be recovered when they are absent in one of the domains. This method can be applied to other fields, which use large data sets and are currently limited by modelling accuracy. The code used in this study is made publicly available on github.
What-If Motion Prediction for Autonomous Driving
Khandelwal, Siddhesh, Qi, William, Singh, Jagjeet, Hartnett, Andrew, Ramanan, Deva
Forecasting the long-term future motion of road actors is a core challenge to the deployment of safe autonomous vehicles (AVs). Viable solutions must account for both the static geometric context, such as road lanes, and dynamic social interactions arising from multiple actors. While recent deep architectures have achieved state-of-the-art performance on distance-based forecasting metrics, these approaches produce forecasts that are predicted without regard to the AV's intended motion plan. In contrast, we propose a recurrent graph-based attentional approach with interpretable geometric (actor-lane) and social (actor-actor) relationships that supports the injection of counterfactual geometric goals and social contexts. Our model can produce diverse predictions conditioned on hypothetical or "what-if" road lanes and multi-actor interactions. We show that such an approach could be used in the planning loop to reason about unobserved causes or unlikely futures that are directly relevant to the AV's intended route.
Intelligent Radio Signal Processing: A Contemporary Survey
Pham, Quoc-Viet, Nguyen, Nhan Thanh, Huynh-The, Thien, Le, Long Bao, Lee, Kyungchun, Hwang, Won-Joo
Intelligent signal processing for wireless communications is a vital task in modern wireless systems, but it faces new challenges because of network heterogeneity, diverse service requirements, a massive number of connections, and various radio characteristics. Owing to recent advancements in big data and computing technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a useful tool for radio signal processing and has enabled the realization of intelligent radio signal processing. This survey covers four intelligent signal processing topics for the wireless physical layer, including modulation classification, signal detection, beamforming, and channel estimation. In particular, each theme is presented in a dedicated section, starting with the most fundamental principles, followed by a review of up-to-date studies and a summary. To provide the necessary background, we first present a brief overview of AI techniques such as machine learning, deep learning, and federated learning. Finally, we highlight a number of research challenges and future directions in the area of intelligent radio signal processing. We expect this survey to be a good source of information for anyone interested in intelligent radio signal processing, and the perspectives we provide therein will stimulate many more novel ideas and contributions in the future.
Polestar: An Intelligent, Efficient and National-Wide Public Transportation Routing Engine
Liu, Hao, Li, Ying, Fu, Yanjie, Mei, Huaibo, Zhou, Jingbo, Ma, Xu, Xiong, Hui
Public transportation plays a critical role in people's daily life. It has been proven that public transportation is more environmentally sustainable, efficient, and economical than any other forms of travel. However, due to the increasing expansion of transportation networks and more complex travel situations, people are having difficulties in efficiently finding the most preferred route from one place to another through public transportation systems. To this end, in this paper, we present Polestar, a data-driven engine for intelligent and efficient public transportation routing. Specifically, we first propose a novel Public Transportation Graph (PTG) to model public transportation system in terms of various travel costs, such as time or distance. Then, we introduce a general route search algorithm coupled with an efficient station binding method for efficient route candidate generation. After that, we propose a two-pass route candidate ranking module to capture user preferences under dynamic travel situations. Finally, experiments on two real-world data sets demonstrate the advantages of Polestar in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Indeed, in early 2019, Polestar has been deployed on Baidu Maps, one of the world's largest map services. To date, Polestar is servicing over 330 cities, answers over a hundred millions of queries each day, and achieves substantial improvement of user click ratio.
Laplacian Change Point Detection for Dynamic Graphs
Huang, Shenyang, Hitti, Yasmeen, Rabusseau, Guillaume, Rabbany, Reihaneh
Dynamic and temporal graphs are rich data structures that are used to model complex relationships between entities over time. In particular, anomaly detection in temporal graphs is crucial for many real world applications such as intrusion identification in network systems, detection of ecosystem disturbances and detection of epidemic outbreaks. In this paper, we focus on change point detection in dynamic graphs and address two main challenges associated with this problem: I) how to compare graph snapshots across time, II) how to capture temporal dependencies. To solve the above challenges, we propose Laplacian Anomaly Detection (LAD) which uses the spectrum of the Laplacian matrix of the graph structure at each snapshot to obtain low dimensional embeddings. LAD explicitly models short term and long term dependencies by applying two sliding windows. In synthetic experiments, LAD outperforms the state-of-the-art method. We also evaluate our method on three real dynamic networks: UCI message network, US senate co-sponsorship network and Canadian bill voting network. In all three datasets, we demonstrate that our method can more effectively identify anomalous time points according to significant real world events.
Policy Evaluation and Seeking for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Best Response
Yan, Rui, Duan, Xiaoming, Shi, Zongying, Zhong, Yisheng, Marden, Jason R., Bullo, Francesco
This paper introduces two metrics (cycle-based and memory-based metrics), grounded on a dynamical game-theoretic solution concept called sink equilibrium, for the evaluation, ranking, and computation of policies in multi-agent learning. We adopt strict best response dynamics (SBRD) to model selfish behaviors at a meta-level for multi-agent reinforcement learning. Our approach can deal with dynamical cyclical behaviors (unlike approaches based on Nash equilibria and Elo ratings), and is more compatible with single-agent reinforcement learning than alpha-rank which relies on weakly better responses. We first consider settings where the difference between largest and second largest underlying metric has a known lower bound. With this knowledge we propose a class of perturbed SBRD with the following property: only policies with maximum metric are observed with nonzero probability for a broad class of stochastic games with finite memory. We then consider settings where the lower bound for the difference is unknown. For this setting, we propose a class of perturbed SBRD such that the metrics of the policies observed with nonzero probability differ from the optimal by any given tolerance. The proposed perturbed SBRD addresses the opponent-induced non-stationarity by fixing the strategies of others for the learning agent, and uses empirical game-theoretic analysis to estimate payoffs for each strategy profile obtained due to the perturbation.
List Learning with Attribute Noise
Cheraghchi, Mahdi, Grigorescu, Elena, Juba, Brendan, Wimmer, Karl, Xie, Ning
We introduce and study the model of list learning with attribute noise. Learning with attribute noise was introduced by Shackelford and Volper (COLT 1988) as a variant of PAC learning, in which the algorithm has access to noisy examples and uncorrupted labels, and the goal is to recover an accurate hypothesis. Sloan (COLT 1988) and Goldman and Sloan (Algorithmica 1995) discovered information-theoretic limits to learning in this model, which have impeded further progress. In this article we extend the model to that of list learning, drawing inspiration from the list-decoding model in coding theory, and its recent variant studied in the context of learning. On the positive side, we show that sparse conjunctions can be efficiently list learned under some assumptions on the underlying ground-truth distribution. On the negative side, our results show that even in the list-learning model, efficient learning of parities and majorities is not possible regardless of the representation used.
Online DR-Submodular Maximization with Stochastic Cumulative Constraints
Raut, Prasanna Sanjay, Sadeghi, Omid, Fazel, Maryam
In this paper, we consider online continuous DR-submodular maximization with linear stochastic long-term constraints. Compared to the prior work on online submodular maximization, our setting introduces the extra complication of stochastic linear constraint functions that are i.i.d. generated at each round. To be precise, at step $t\in\{1,\dots,T\}$, a DR-submodular utility function $f_t(\cdot)$ and a constraint vector $p_t$, i.i.d. generated from an unknown distribution with mean $p$, are revealed after committing to an action $x_t$ and we aim to maximize the overall utility while the expected cumulative resource consumption $\sum_{t=1}^T \langle p,x_t\rangle$ is below a fixed budget $B_T$. Stochastic long-term constraints arise naturally in applications where there is a limited budget or resource available and resource consumption at each step is governed by stochastically time-varying environments. We propose the Online Lagrangian Frank-Wolfe (OLFW) algorithm to solve this class of online problems. We analyze the performance of the OLFW algorithm and we obtain sub-linear regret bounds as well as sub-linear cumulative constraint violation bounds, both in expectation and with high probability.
Active Measure Reinforcement Learning for Observation Cost Minimization
Bellinger, Colin, Coles, Rory, Crowley, Mark, Tamblyn, Isaac
Standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that the observation of the next state comes instantaneously and at no cost. In a wide variety of sequential decision making tasks ranging from medical treatment to scientific discovery, however, multiple classes of state observations are possible, each of which has an associated cost. We propose the active measure RL framework (Amrl) as an initial solution to this problem where the agent learns to maximize the costed return, which we define as the discounted sum of rewards minus the sum of observation costs. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that Amrl-Q agents are able to learn a policy and state estimator in parallel during online training. During training the agent naturally shifts from its reliance on costly measurements of the environment to its state estimator in order to increase its reward. It does this without harm to the learned policy. Our results show that the Amrl-Q agent learns at a rate similar to standard Q-learning and Dyna-Q. Critically, by utilizing an active strategy, Amrl-Q achieves a higher costed return.
Thompson Sampling for Combinatorial Semi-bandits with Sleeping Arms and Long-Term Fairness Constraints
Huang, Zhiming, Xu, Yifan, Hu, Bingshan, Wang, Qipeng, Pan, Jianping
We study the combinatorial sleeping multi-armed semi-bandit problem with long-term fairness constraints~(CSMAB-F). To address the problem, we adopt Thompson Sampling~(TS) to maximize the total rewards and use virtual queue techniques to handle the fairness constraints, and design an algorithm called \emph{TS with beta priors and Bernoulli likelihoods for CSMAB-F~(TSCSF-B)}. Further, we prove TSCSF-B can satisfy the fairness constraints, and the time-averaged regret is upper bounded by $\frac{N}{2\eta} + O\left(\frac{\sqrt{mNT\ln T}}{T}\right)$, where $N$ is the total number of arms, $m$ is the maximum number of arms that can be pulled simultaneously in each round~(the cardinality constraint) and $\eta$ is the parameter trading off fairness for rewards. By relaxing the fairness constraints (i.e., let $\eta \rightarrow \infty$), the bound boils down to the first problem-independent bound of TS algorithms for combinatorial sleeping multi-armed semi-bandit problems. Finally, we perform numerical experiments and use a high-rating movie recommendation application to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.