Oceania
Long-tail learning via logit adjustment
Menon, Aditya Krishna, Jayasumana, Sadeep, Rawat, Ankit Singh, Jain, Himanshu, Veit, Andreas, Kumar, Sanjiv
Real-world classification problems typically exhibit an imbalanced or long-tailed label distribution, wherein many labels are associated with only a few samples. This poses a challenge for generalisation on such labels, and also makes na\"ive learning biased towards dominant labels. In this paper, we present two simple modifications of standard softmax cross-entropy training to cope with these challenges. Our techniques revisit the classic idea of logit adjustment based on the label frequencies, either applied post-hoc to a trained model, or enforced in the loss during training. Such adjustment encourages a large relative margin between logits of rare versus dominant labels. These techniques unify and generalise several recent proposals in the literature, while possessing firmer statistical grounding and empirical performance.
Deep Composition of Tensor Trains using Squared Inverse Rosenblatt Transports
Characterising intractable high-dimensional random variables is one of the fundamental challenges in stochastic computation. The recent surge of transport maps offers a mathematical foundation and new insights for tackling this challenge by coupling intractable random variables with tractable reference random variables. This paper generalises a recently developed functional tensor-train (FTT) approximation of the inverse Rosenblatt transport [14] to a wide class of high-dimensional nonnegative functions, such as unnormalised probability density functions. First, we extend the inverse Rosenblatt transform to enable the transport to general reference measures other than the uniform measure. We develop an efficient procedure to compute this transport from a squared FTT decomposition which preserves the monotonicity. More crucially, we integrate the proposed monotonicity-preserving FTT transport into a nested variable transformation framework inspired by deep neural networks. The resulting deep inverse Rosenblatt transport significantly expands the capability of tensor approximations and transport maps to random variables with complicated nonlinear interactions and concentrated density functions. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach on a range of applications in statistical learning and uncertainty quantification, including parameter estimation for dynamical systems and inverse problems constrained by partial differential equations.
Spectrum-Guided Adversarial Disparity Learning
Liu, Zhe, Yao, Lina, Bai, Lei, Wang, Xianzhi, Wang, Can
In this work, we propose a novel end-toend to improve models' robustness on new subjects. Given that generative knowledge directed adversarial learning framework, which models usually perform better on sparse data, However, most portrays the class-conditioned intraclass disparity using two competitive subject-independent studies [1, 20, 25, 30] are still limited in considering encoding distributions and learns the purified latent codes the intraclass disparity as meaningless noise and neglect by denoising learned disparity. Furthermore, the domain knowledge the point that intraclass disparity is related to the subject and the is incorporated in an unsupervised manner to guide the optimization class type. They are still inaccurate in exhibiting the relationship and further boosts the performance. The experiments on four between the subject variation and the class, e.g., subject variation HAR benchmark datasets demonstrate the robustness and generalization within a class should be conditionally constrained. of our proposed methods over a set of state-of-the-art. We Besides, signal data may be segmented imprecisely, and the segments further prove the effectiveness of automatic domain knowledge may include gaps and noises. Further, the segments carry incorporation in performance enhancement.
Why we need a 'Wicked Problems Agency'
The first five months of 2020 sent a parade of "wicked problems" around the globe, including a plague of locusts in Asia and Africa, bushfires in Australia and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Wicked problems can be defined as problems that no one knows how to solve without creating further problems. We struggle to mitigate them because they transcend borders and generations. During and after World War II, policymakers also confronted significant problems, such as how to keep the peace, encourage recovery and prevent starvation. They tackled these problems by creating collaborative institutions and rules, and by providing generous aid and technical assistance.
State Super moves to add machine learning tools
Australia's State Super has hired Neuberger Berman LLC for an equity mandate and to help the fund accelerate development of data science and machine learning tools that can complement its more traditional investment capabilities. The move reflects continued concerns that conventional approaches to managing the Sydney-based fund's A$44 billion ($30.2 billion) portfolio may not meet the moment in unconventional times. "My biggest concern is what happens if the market is behaving in an abnormal way," outside of the industry's knowledge base and modeling conventions, said Charles Wu, State Super's deputy chief investment officer and general manager, defined contribution investments, in an interview. In that regard, Mr. Wu said the emergence of negative sovereign bond yields three years ago was a warning bell. In the current environment, "a different way of thinking is required" and machine learning -- with its potential to come to a problem without prejudices or preconceptions -- can help State Super's team navigate a world growing evermore different from the one everyone has been trained to think about, he said.
Single-partition adaptive Q-learning
Araรบjo, Joรฃo Pedro, Figueiredo, Mรกrio, Botto, Miguel Ayala
This paper introduces single-partition adaptive Q-learning (SPAQL), an algorithm for model-free episodic reinforcement learning (RL), which adaptively partitions the state-action space of a Markov decision process (MDP), while simultaneously learning a time-invariant policy (i. e., the mapping from states to actions does not depend explicitly on the episode time step) for maximizing the cumulative reward. The trade-off between exploration and exploitation is handled by using a mixture of upper confidence bounds (UCB) and Boltzmann exploration during training, with a temperature parameter that is automatically tuned as training progresses. The algorithm is an improvement over adaptive Q-learning (AQL). It converges faster to the optimal solution, while also using fewer arms. Tests on episodes with a large number of time steps show that SPAQL has no problems scaling, unlike AQL. Based on this empirical evidence, we claim that SPAQL may have a higher sample efficiency than AQL, thus being a relevant contribution to the field of efficient model-free RL methods.
Open-Domain Conversational Agents: Current Progress, Open Problems, and Future Directions
Roller, Stephen, Boureau, Y-Lan, Weston, Jason, Bordes, Antoine, Dinan, Emily, Fan, Angela, Gunning, David, Ju, Da, Li, Margaret, Poff, Spencer, Ringshia, Pratik, Shuster, Kurt, Smith, Eric Michael, Szlam, Arthur, Urbanek, Jack, Williamson, Mary
Further, we discuss only open academic research with entertaining wit and knowledge while making others feel reproducible published results, hence we will not address heard. The breadth of possible conversation topics and lack much of the considerable work that has been put into building of a well-defined objective make it challenging to define a commercial systems, where methods, data and results roadmap towards training a good conversational agent, or are not in the public domain. Finally, given that we focus on chatbot. Despite recent progress across the board (Adiwardana open-domain conversation, we do not focus on specific goaloriented et al., 2020; Roller et al., 2020), conversational agents techniques; we also do not cover spoken dialogue in are still incapable of carrying an open-domain conversation this work, focusing on text and image input/output only. For that remains interesting, consistent, accurate, and reliably more general recent surveys, see Gao et al. (2019); Jurafsky well-behaved (e.g., not offensive) while navigating a variety and Martin (2019); Huang, Zhu, and Gao (2020). of topics. Traditional task-oriented dialogue systems rely on slotfilling and structured modules (e.g., Young et al. (2013); Gao et al. (2019); Jurafsky and Martin (2019)).
Deployment and Evaluation of a Flexible Human-Robot Collaboration Model Based on AND/OR Graphs in a Manufacturing Environment
Murali, Prajval Kumar, Darvish, Kourosh, Mastrogiovanni, Fulvio
The Industry 4.0 paradigm promises shorter development times, increased ergonomy, higher flexibility, and resource efficiency in manufacturing environments. Collaborative robots are an important tangible technology for implementing such a paradigm. A major bottleneck to effectively deploy collaborative robots to manufacturing industries is developing task planning algorithms that enable them to recognize and naturally adapt to varying and even unpredictable human actions while simultaneously ensuring an overall efficiency in terms of production cycle time. In this context, an architecture encompassing task representation, task planning, sensing, and robot control has been designed, developed and evaluated in a real industrial environment. A pick-and-place palletization task, which requires the collaboration between humans and robots, is investigated. The architecture uses AND/OR graphs for representing and reasoning upon human-robot collaboration models online. Furthermore, objective measures of the overall computational performance and subjective measures of naturalness in human-robot collaboration have been evaluated by performing experiments with production-line operators. The results of this user study demonstrate how human-robot collaboration models like the one we propose can leverage the flexibility and the comfort of operators in the workplace. In this regard, an extensive comparison study among recent models has been carried out.
Integrating Variable Reduction Strategy with Evolutionary Algorithm for Solving Nonlinear Equations Systems
Song, Aijuan, Wu, Guohua, Pedrycz, Witold
Nonlinear equations systems (NESs) are widely used in real-world problems while they are also difficult to solve due to their characteristics of nonlinearity and multiple roots. Evolutionary algorithm (EA) is one of the methods for solving NESs, given their global search capability and an ability to locate multiple roots of a NES simultaneously within one run. Currently, the majority of research on using EAs to solve NESs focuses on transformation techniques and improving the performance of the used EAs. By contrast, the problem domain knowledge of NESs is particularly investigated in this study, using which we propose to incorporate the variable reduction strategy (VRS) into EAs to solve NESs. VRS makes full use of the systems of expressing a NES and uses some variables (i.e., core variable) to represent other variables (i.e., reduced variables) through the variable relationships existing in the equation systems. It enables to reduce partial variables and equations and shrink the decision space, thereby reducing the complexity of the problem and improving the search efficiency of the EAs. To test the effectiveness of VRS in dealing with NESs, this paper integrates VRS into two existing state-of-the-art EA methods (i.e., MONES and DRJADE), respectively. Experimental results show that, with the assistance of VRS, the EA methods can significantly produce better results than the original methods and other compared methods.
Calling Out Bluff: Attacking the Robustness of Automatic Scoring Systems with Simple Adversarial Testing
Kumar, Yaman, Bhatia, Mehar, Kabra, Anubha, Li, Jessy Junyi, Jin, Di, Shah, Rajiv Ratn
A significant progress has been made in deep-learning based Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) systems in the past two decades. The performance commonly measured by the standard performance metrics like Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK), and accuracy points to the same. However, testing on common-sense adversarial examples of these AES systems reveal their lack of natural language understanding capability. Inspired by common student behaviour during examinations, we propose a task agnostic adversarial evaluation scheme for AES systems to test their natural language understanding capabilities and overall robustness.