Oceania
TENT: Text Classification Based on ENcoding Tree Learning
Zhang, Chong, Wu, Junran, Zhu, He, Xu, Ke
Text classification is a primary task in natural language processing (NLP). Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have developed rapidly and been applied to text classification tasks. Although more complex models tend to achieve better performance, research highly depends on the computing power of the device used. In this article, we propose TENT (https://github.com/Daisean/TENT) to obtain better text classification performance and reduce the reliance on computing power. Specifically, we first establish a dependency analysis graph for each text and then convert each graph into its corresponding encoding tree. The representation of the entire graph is obtained by updating the representation of the non-leaf nodes in the encoding tree. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other baselines on several datasets while having a simple structure and few parameters.
Data Augmentation Approaches in Natural Language Processing: A Survey
Li, Bohan, Hou, Yutai, Che, Wanxiang
As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges.
Compression, The Fermi Paradox and Artificial Super-Intelligence
The latter suggests that to infer what someone means, an agent constructs a rationale for the observed behaviour of others. Communication then requires two agents labour under similar compulsions and have similar experiences (construct similar solutions to similar tasks). Any non-human intelligence may construct solutions such that any rationale for their behaviour (and thus the meaning of their signals) is outside the scope of what a human is inclined to notice or comprehend. Further, the more compressed a signal, the closer it will appear to random noise. Another intelligence may possess the ability to compress information to the extent that, to us, their signals would appear indistinguishable from noise (an explanation for The Fermi Paradox). To facilitate predictive accuracy an AGI would tend to more compressed representations of the world, making any rationale for their behaviour more difficult to comprehend for the same reason. Communication with and control of an AGI may subsequently necessitate not only human-like compulsions and experiences, but imposed cognitive impairment.
The Artificial Scientist: Logicist, Emergentist, and Universalist Approaches to Artificial General Intelligence
Bennett, Michael Timothy, Maruyama, Yoshihiro
We attempt to define what is necessary to construct an Artificial Scientist, explore and evaluate several approaches to artificial general intelligence (AGI) which may facilitate this, conclude that a unified or hybrid approach is necessary and explore two theories that satisfy this requirement to some degree.
Uncertainty-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning with Diversified Q-Ensemble
An, Gaon, Moon, Seungyong, Kim, Jang-Hyun, Song, Hyun Oh
Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL), which aims to find an optimal policy from a previously collected static dataset, bears algorithmic difficulties due to function approximation errors from out-of-distribution (OOD) data points. To this end, offline RL algorithms adopt either a constraint or a penalty term that explicitly guides the policy to stay close to the given dataset. However, prior methods typically require accurate estimation of the behavior policy or sampling from OOD data points, which themselves can be a non-trivial problem. Moreover, these methods under-utilize the generalization ability of deep neural networks and often fall into suboptimal solutions too close to the given dataset. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-based offline RL method that takes into account the confidence of the Q-value prediction and does not require any estimation or sampling of the data distribution. We show that the clipped Q-learning, a technique widely used in online RL, can be leveraged to successfully penalize OOD data points with high prediction uncertainties. Surprisingly, we find that it is possible to substantially outperform existing offline RL methods on various tasks by simply increasing the number of Q-networks along with the clipped Q-learning. Based on this observation, we propose an ensemble-diversified actor-critic algorithm that reduces the number of required ensemble networks down to a tenth compared to the naive ensemble while achieving state-of-the-art performance on most of the D4RL benchmarks considered.
NeurWIN: Neural Whittle Index Network For Restless Bandits Via Deep RL
Nakhleh, Khaled, Ganji, Santosh, Hsieh, Ping-Chun, Hou, I-Hong, Shakkottai, Srinivas
Whittle index policy is a powerful tool to obtain asymptotically optimal solutions for the notoriously intractable problem of restless bandits. However, finding the Whittle indices remains a difficult problem for many practical restless bandits with convoluted transition kernels. This paper proposes NeurWIN, a neural Whittle index network that seeks to learn the Whittle indices for any restless bandits by leveraging mathematical properties of the Whittle indices. We show that a neural network that produces the Whittle index is also one that produces the optimal control for a set of Markov decision problems. This property motivates using deep reinforcement learning for the training of NeurWIN. We demonstrate the utility of NeurWIN by evaluating its performance for three recently studied restless bandit problems. Our experiment results show that the performance of NeurWIN is significantly better than other RL algorithms.
Exploring the Limits of Large Scale Pre-training
Abnar, Samira, Dehghani, Mostafa, Neyshabur, Behnam, Sedghi, Hanie
Recent developments in large-scale machine learning suggest that by scaling up data, model size and training time properly, one might observe that improvements in pre-training would transfer favorably to most downstream tasks. In this work, we systematically study this phenomena and establish that, as we increase the upstream accuracy, the performance of downstream tasks saturates. In particular, we investigate more than 4800 experiments on Vision Transformers, MLP-Mixers and ResNets with number of parameters ranging from ten million to ten billion, trained on the largest scale of available image data (JFT, ImageNet21K) and evaluated on more than 20 downstream image recognition tasks. We propose a model for downstream performance that reflects the saturation phenomena and captures the nonlinear relationship in performance of upstream and downstream tasks. Delving deeper to understand the reasons that give rise to these phenomena, we show that the saturation behavior we observe is closely related to the way that representations evolve through the layers of the models. We showcase an even more extreme scenario where performance on upstream and downstream are at odds with each other. That is, to have a better downstream performance, we need to hurt upstream accuracy.
Information-theoretic generalization bounds for black-box learning algorithms
Harutyunyan, Hrayr, Raginsky, Maxim, Steeg, Greg Ver, Galstyan, Aram
We derive information-theoretic generalization bounds for supervised learning algorithms based on the information contained in predictions rather than in the output of the training algorithm. These bounds improve over the existing information-theoretic bounds, are applicable to a wider range of algorithms, and solve two key challenges: (a) they give meaningful results for deterministic algorithms and (b) they are significantly easier to estimate. We show experimentally that the proposed bounds closely follow the generalization gap in practical scenarios for deep learning.
Does AI Create or Destroy Jobs? What is the Real Threat to Human Society Over the Coming Decades?
Artificial intelligence (AI) will create new job opportunities, not destroy them. AI will displace some jobs but will create new ones. The main aim of this article is intended to focus the minds of our political and business leaders as they consider what strategies to pursue to grow the economy (GDP), business activity and stimulate job creation whilst also taking into account the growing challenges of the environment with climate change mitigation increasingly on the agenda. Let's start by reviewing the types of AI and where we are now. Narrow AI: the field of AI where the machine is designed to perform a single task and the machine gets very good at performing that particular task.
Overcoming Roadblocks Retailers Face When Implementing AI
It might feel as though artificial intelligence has reached a critical mass, but it hasn't. In fact, it's only starting to make an impact in some sectors, including retail. But, according to findings collected by KPMG, retail AI has room to grow -- and a lot of it. And by 2027, AI in retail will balloon to $19.9 billion from around $7.3 billion in predicted spending in 2022, per Meticulous Research. All this, and only half of the retail professionals believe they've scratched the surface of what's possible when the technology meets in-person shopping.