Oceania
Robotic fish scares invasive species so badly that it cannot breed
Robotic fish might help solve an ecological problem by scaring an invasive fish species so profoundly that it is put off breeding. Eastern mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) were introduced in many parts of the world to eat mosquito larvae and keep the disease-spreading insects under control. But they have had a negative and unintended consequence on local fauna: they chew the tails of native freshwater fish and tadpoles, then leave them to die. Reducing numbers of eastern mosquitofish without harming other wildlife is a difficult prospect, but Giovanni Polverino at the University of Western Australia and his colleagues have come up with a potential solution. They designed a robotic version of the largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides), which naturally preys on mosquitofish.
Ghost in the machine or monkey with a typewriter--generating titles for Christmas research articles in The BMJ using artificial intelligence: observational study
Objective To determine whether artificial intelligence (AI) can generate plausible and engaging titles for potential Christmas research articles in The BMJ . Design Observational study. Setting Europe, Australia, and Africa. Participants 1 AI technology (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, GPT-3) and 25 humans. Main outcome measures Plausibility, attractiveness, enjoyability, and educational value of titles for potential Christmas research articles in The BMJ generated by GPT-3 compared with historical controls. Results AI generated titles were rated at least as enjoyable (159/250 responses (64%) v 346/500 responses (69%); odds ratio 0.9, 95% confidence interval 0.7 to 1.2) and attractive (176/250 (70%) v 342/500 (68%); 1.1, 0.8 to 1.4) as real control titles, although the real titles were rated as more plausible (182/250 (73%) v 238/500 (48%); 3.1, 2.3 to 4.1). The AI generated titles overall were rated as having less scientific or educational merit than the real controls (146/250 (58%) v 193/500 (39%); 2.0, 1.5 to 2.6); this difference, however, became non-significant when humans curated the AI output (146/250 (58%) v 123/250 (49%); 1.3, 1.0 to 1.8). Of the AI generated titles, the most plausible was โThe association between belief in conspiracy theories and the willingness to receive vaccinations,โ and the highest rated was โThe effects of free gourmet coffee on emergency department waiting times: an observational study.โ Conclusions AI can generate plausible, entertaining, and scientifically interesting titles for potential Christmas research articles in The BMJ ; as in other areas of medicine, performance was enhanced by human intervention. Dataset and full reproducible code are available at .
Bridging between Cognitive Processing Signals and Linguistic Features via a Unified Attentional Network
Cognitive processing signals can be used to improve natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, it is not clear how these signals correlate with linguistic information. Bridging between human language processing and linguistic features has been widely studied in neurolinguistics, usually via single-variable controlled experiments with highly-controlled stimuli. Such methods not only compromises the authenticity of natural reading, but also are time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we propose a data-driven method to investigate the relationship between cognitive processing signals and linguistic features. Specifically, we present a unified attentional framework that is composed of embedding, attention, encoding and predicting layers to selectively map cognitive processing signals to linguistic features. We define the mapping procedure as a bridging task and develop 12 bridging tasks for lexical, syntactic and semantic features. The proposed framework only requires cognitive processing signals recorded under natural reading as inputs, and can be used to detect a wide range of linguistic features with a single cognitive dataset. Observations from experiment results resonate with previous neuroscience findings. In addition to this, our experiments also reveal a number of interesting findings, such as the correlation between contextual eye-tracking features and tense of sentence.
Link-Intensive Alignment for Incomplete Knowledge Graphs
Van Tong, Vinh, Huynh, Thanh Trung, Nguyen, Thanh Tam, Yin, Hongzhi, Nguyen, Quoc Viet Hung, Huynh, Quyet Thang
Knowledge graph (KG) alignment - the task of recognizing entities referring to the same thing in different KGs - is recognized as one of the most important operations in the field of KG construction and completion. However, existing alignment techniques often assume that the input KGs are complete and isomorphic, which is not true due to the real-world heterogeneity in the domain, size, and sparsity. In this work, we address the problem of aligning incomplete KGs with representation learning. Our KG embedding framework exploits two feature channels: transitivity-based and proximity-based. The former captures the consistency constraints between entities via translation paths, while the latter captures the neighbourhood structure of KGs via attention guided relation-aware graph neural network. The two feature channels are jointly learned to exchange important features between the input KGs while enforcing the output representations of the input KGs in the same embedding space. Also, we develop a missing links detector that discovers and recovers the missing links in the input KGs during the training process, which helps mitigate the incompleteness issue and thus improve the compatibility of the learned representations. The embeddings then are fused to generate the alignment result, and the high-confidence matched node pairs are updated to the pre-aligned supervision data to improve the embeddings gradually. Empirical results show that our model is up to 15.2\% more accurate than the SOTA and is robust against different levels of incompleteness. We also demonstrate that the knowledge exchanging between the KGs helps reveal the unseen facts from knowledge graphs (a.k.a. knowledge completion), with the result being 3.5\% higher than the SOTA knowledge graph completion techniques.
Two-view Graph Neural Networks for Knowledge Graph Completion
Tong, Vinh, Nguyen, Dai Quoc, Phung, Dinh, Nguyen, Dat Quoc
To this end, we propose a new KG embedding model, named A knowledge graph (KG) is a network of entity nodes and WGE, to leverage GNNs to capture entity-focused graph structure relationship edges, which can be represented as a collection and relation-focused graph structure for KG completion. of triples in the form of (h, r, t), wherein each triple (h, r, In particular, WGE transforms a given KG into two views. The t) represents a relation r between a head entity h and a tail first view--a single undirected entity-focused graph--only entity t. Here, entities are real-world things or objects such includes entities as nodes to provide the entity neighborhood as music tracks, movies persons, organizations, places and the information. The second view--a single undirected relationfocused like, while each relation type determines a certain relationship graph--considers both entities and relations as nodes, between entities. KGs are used in a number of commercial applications, constructed from constraints (subjective relation, predicate e.g. in such search engines as Google, Microsoft's entity, objective relation), to attain the potential dependence Bing and Facebook's Graph search. They also are useful between two neighborhood relations. Then WGE introduces a resources for many natural language processing tasks such as new encoder module of adopting two vanilla GNNs directly co-reference resolution ([1], [2]), semantic parsing ([3], [4]) on these two graph views to better update entity and relation and question answering ([5], [6]). However, an issue is that embeddings, followed by the decoder module using a weighted KGs are often incomplete, i.e., missing a lot of valid triples score function. In summary, our contributions are as follows: [7].
Learning from Guided Play: A Scheduled Hierarchical Approach for Improving Exploration in Adversarial Imitation Learning
Ablett, Trevor, Chan, Bryan, Kelly, Jonathan
Effective exploration continues to be a significant challenge that prevents the deployment of reinforcement learning for many physical systems. This is particularly true for systems with continuous and high-dimensional state and action spaces, such as robotic manipulators. The challenge is accentuated in the sparse rewards setting, where the low-level state information required for the design of dense rewards is unavailable. Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) can partially overcome this barrier by leveraging expert-generated demonstrations of optimal behaviour and providing, essentially, a replacement for dense reward information. Unfortunately, the availability of expert demonstrations does not necessarily improve an agent's capability to explore effectively and, as we empirically show, can lead to inefficient or stagnated learning. We present Learning from Guided Play (LfGP), a framework in which we leverage expert demonstrations of, in addition to a main task, multiple auxiliary tasks. Subsequently, a hierarchical model is used to learn each task reward and policy through a modified AIL procedure, in which exploration of all tasks is enforced via a scheduler composing different tasks together. This affords many benefits: learning efficiency is improved for main tasks with challenging bottleneck transitions, expert data becomes reusable between tasks, and transfer learning through the reuse of learned auxiliary task models becomes possible. Our experimental results in a challenging multitask robotic manipulation domain indicate that our method compares favourably to supervised imitation learning and to a state-of-the-art AIL method. Code is available at https://github.com/utiasSTARS/lfgp.
Intelli-Paint: Towards Developing Human-like Painting Agents
Singh, Jaskirat, Smith, Cameron, Echevarria, Jose, Zheng, Liang
The generation of well-designed artwork is often quite time-consuming and assumes a high degree of proficiency on part of the human painter. In order to facilitate the human painting process, substantial research efforts have been made on teaching machines how to "paint like a human", and then using the trained agent as a painting assistant tool for human users. However, current research in this direction is often reliant on a progressive grid-based division strategy wherein the agent divides the overall image into successively finer grids, and then proceeds to paint each of them in parallel. This inevitably leads to artificial painting sequences which are not easily intelligible to human users. To address this, we propose a novel painting approach which learns to generate output canvases while exhibiting a more human-like painting style. The proposed painting pipeline Intelli-Paint consists of 1) a progressive layering strategy which allows the agent to first paint a natural background scene representation before adding in each of the foreground objects in a progressive fashion. 2) We also introduce a novel sequential brushstroke guidance strategy which helps the painting agent to shift its attention between different image regions in a semantic-aware manner. 3) Finally, we propose a brushstroke regularization strategy which allows for ~60-80% reduction in the total number of required brushstrokes without any perceivable differences in the quality of the generated canvases. Through both quantitative and qualitative results, we show that the resulting agents not only show enhanced efficiency in output canvas generation but also exhibit a more natural-looking painting style which would better assist human users express their ideas through digital artwork.
Inherently Explainable Reinforcement Learning in Natural Language
Peng, Xiangyu, Riedl, Mark O., Ammanabrolu, Prithviraj
We focus on the task of creating a reinforcement learning agent that is inherently explainable -- with the ability to produce immediate local explanations by thinking out loud while performing a task and analyzing entire trajectories post-hoc to produce causal explanations. This Hierarchically Explainable Reinforcement Learning agent (HEX-RL), operates in Interactive Fictions, text-based game environments in which an agent perceives and acts upon the world using textual natural language. These games are usually structured as puzzles or quests with long-term dependencies in which an agent must complete a sequence of actions to succeed -- providing ideal environments in which to test an agent's ability to explain its actions. Our agent is designed to treat explainability as a first-class citizen, using an extracted symbolic knowledge graph-based state representation coupled with a Hierarchical Graph Attention mechanism that points to the facts in the internal graph representation that most influenced the choice of actions. Experiments show that this agent provides significantly improved explanations over strong baselines, as rated by human participants generally unfamiliar with the environment, while also matching state-of-the-art task performance.
Graph Structure Learning with Variational Information Bottleneck
Sun, Qingyun, Li, Jianxin, Peng, Hao, Wu, Jia, Fu, Xingcheng, Ji, Cheng, Yu, Philip S.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications. Most empirical studies of GNNs directly take the observed graph as input, assuming the observed structure perfectly depicts the accurate and complete relations between nodes. However, graphs in the real world are inevitably noisy or incomplete, which could even exacerbate the quality of graph representations. In this work, we propose a novel Variational Information Bottleneck guided Graph Structure Learning framework, namely VIB-GSL, in the perspective of information theory. VIB-GSL advances the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for graph structure learning, providing a more elegant and universal framework for mining underlying task-relevant relations. VIB-GSL learns an informative and compressive graph structure to distill the actionable information for specific downstream tasks. VIB-GSL deduces a variational approximation for irregular graph data to form a tractable IB objective function, which facilitates training stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the superior effectiveness and robustness of VIB-GSL.