Oceania
Emergent Coordination Through Competition
Liu, Siqi, Lever, Guy, Merel, Josh, Tunyasuvunakool, Saran, Heess, Nicolas, Graepel, Thore
We study the emergence of cooperative behaviors in reinforcement learning agents by introducing a challenging competitive multi-agent soccer environment with continuous simulated physics. We demonstrate that decentralized, population-based training with co-play can lead to a progression in agents' behaviors: from random, to simple ball chasing, and finally showing evidence of cooperation. Our study highlights several of the challenges encountered in large scale multi-agent training in continuous control. In particular, we demonstrate that the automatic optimization of simple shaping rewards, not themselves conducive to co-operative behavior, can lead to long-horizon team behavior. We further apply an evaluation scheme, grounded by game theoretic principals, that can assess agent performance in the absence of pre-defined evaluation tasks or human baselines.
DIALOG: A framework for modeling, analysis and reuse of digital forensic knowledge
Kahvedzic, Damir, Kechadi, Tahar
This paper presents DIALOG (Digital Investigation Ontology); a framework for the management, reuse, and analysis of Digital Investigation knowledge. DIALOG provides a general, application independent vocabulary that can be used to describe an investigation at different levels of detail. DIALOG is defined to encapsulate all concepts of the digital forensics field and the relationships between them. In particular, we concentrate on the Windows Registry, where registry keys are modeled in terms of both their structure and function. Registry analysis software tools are modeled in a similar manner and we illustrate how the interpretation of their results can be done using the reasoning capabilities of ontology
Bayesian optimisation under uncertain inputs
Oliveira, Rafael, Ott, Lionel, Ramos, Fabio
Bayesian optimisation (BO) has been a successful approach to optimise functions which are expensive to evaluate and whose observations are noisy. Classical BO algorithms, however, do not account for errors about the location where observations are taken, which is a common issue in problems with physical components. In these cases, the estimation of the actual query location is also subject to uncertainty. In this context, we propose an upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithm for BO problems where both the outcome of a query and the true query location are uncertain. The algorithm employs a Gaussian process model that takes probability distributions as inputs. Theoretical results are provided for both the proposed algorithm and a conventional UCB approach within the uncertain-inputs setting. Finally, we evaluate each method's performance experimentally, comparing them to other input noise aware BO approaches on simulated scenarios involving synthetic and real data.
Prediction of Malignant & Benign Breast Cancer: A Data Mining Approach in Healthcare Applications
Kumar, Vivek, Mishra, Brojo Kumar, Mazzara, Manuel, Thanh, Dang N. H., Verma, Abhishek
As much as data science is playing a pivotal role everywhere, healthcare also finds it prominent application. Breast Cancer is the top rated type of cancer amongst women; which took away 627,000 lives alone. This high mortality rate due to breast cancer does need attention, for early detection so that prevention can be done in time. As a potential contributor to state-of-art technology development, data mining finds a multi-fold application in predicting Brest cancer. This work focuses on different classification techniques implementation for data mining in predicting malignant and benign breast cancer. Breast Cancer Wisconsin data set from the UCI repository has been used as experimental dataset while attribute clump thickness being used as an evaluation class. The performances of these twelve algorithms: Ada Boost M 1, Decision Table, J Rip, Lazy IBK, Logistics Regression, Multiclass Classifier, Multilayer Perceptron, Naive Bayes, Random forest and Random Tree are analyzed on this data set. Keywords- Data Mining, Classification Techniques, UCI repository, Breast Cancer, Classification Algorithms
A Comparative Analysis of Expected and Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Lyle, Clare, Castro, Pablo Samuel, Bellemare, Marc G.
Since their introduction a year ago, distributional approaches to reinforcement learning (distributional RL) have produced strong results relative to the standard approach which models expected values (expected RL). However, aside from convergence guarantees, there have been few theoretical results investigating the reasons behind the improvements distributional RL provides. In this paper we begin the investigation into this fundamental question by analyzing the differences in the tabular, linear approximation, and non-linear approximation settings. We prove that in many realizations of the tabular and linear approximation settings, distributional RL behaves exactly the same as expected RL. In cases where the two methods behave differently, distributional RL can in fact hurt performance when it does not induce identical behaviour. We then continue with an empirical analysis comparing distributional and expected RL methods in control settings with non-linear approximators to tease apart where the improvements from distributional RL methods are coming from.
A Conjoint Application of Data Mining Techniques for Analysis of Global Terrorist Attacks -- Prevention and Prediction for Combating Terrorism
Kumar, Vivek, Mazzara, Manuel, Gen., Maj., Messina, Angelo, Lee, JooYoung
Terrorism has become one of the most tedious problems to deal with and a prominent threat to mankind. To enhance counter-terrorism, several research works are developing efficient and precise systems, data mining is not an exception. Immense data is floating in our lives, though the scarce availability of authentic terrorist attack data in the public domain makes it complicated to fight terrorism. This manuscript focuses on data mining classification techniques and discusses the role of United Nations in counter-terrorism. It analyzes the performance of classifiers such as Lazy Tree, Multilayer Perceptron, Multiclass and Na\"ive Bayes classifiers for observing the trends for terrorist attacks around the world. The database for experiment purpose is created from different public and open access sources for years 1970-2015 comprising of 156,772 reported attacks causing massive losses of lives and property. This work enumerates the losses occurred, trends in attack frequency and places more prone to it, by considering the attack responsibilities taken as evaluation class.
Latent Translation: Crossing Modalities by Bridging Generative Models
End-to-end optimization has achieved state-of-the-art performance on many specific problems, but there is no straight-forward way to combine pretrained models for new problems. Here, we explore improving modularity by learning a post-hoc interface between two existing models to solve a new task. Specifically, we take inspiration from neural machine translation, and cast the challenging problem of cross-modal domain transfer as unsupervised translation between the latent spaces of pretrained deep generative models. By abstracting away the data representation, we demonstrate that it is possible to transfer across different modalities (e.g., image-to-audio) and even different types of generative models (e.g., VAE-to-GAN). We compare to state-of-the-art techniques and find that a straight-forward variational autoencoder is able to best bridge the two generative models through learning a shared latent space. We can further impose supervised alignment of attributes in both domains with a classifier in the shared latent space. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that locality and semantic alignment are preserved through the transfer process, as indicated by high transfer accuracies and smooth interpolations within a class. Finally, we show this modular structure speeds up training of new interface models by several orders of magnitude by decoupling it from expensive retraining of base generative models.
Trump wants better AI. He also wants less immigration. He can't have both.
President Donald Trump released a splashy new plan for American artificial intelligence last week. High on enthusiasm, low on details, its goal is to ramp up the rate of progress in AI research so the United States won't get outpaced by countries like China. Experts had been warning for months that under Trump, the US hasn't been doing enough to maintain its competitive edge. Now, it seems, Trump has finally got the memo. His executive order, signed February 11, promises to "drive technological breakthroughs ... in order to promote scientific discovery, economic competitiveness, and national security."
Free Webinar: Humanising Your Bot
Hear the discussion from copywriter, voice actor and marketer Rew Shearer as he talks through the why, how, and watch out! of chatbot personality in this short live webinar co-hosted by Chief Conversologist Jam Mayer. One of the hardest elements of creating a chatbot is personality. Building a chatbot can be easy. But getting the conversation right is hard. Do you even need a personality for your chatbot – and why?
Stacking with Neural network for Cryptocurrency investment
Barnwal, Avinash, Bharti, Haripad, Ali, Aasim, Singh, Vishal
Predicting the direction of assets have been an active area of study and a difficult task. Machine learning models have been used to build robust models to model the above task. Ensemble methods is one of them showing results better than a single supervised method. In this paper, we have used generative and discriminative classifiers to create the stack, particularly 3 generative and 9 discriminative classifiers and optimized over one-layer Neural Network to model the direction of price cryptocurrencies. Features used are technical indicators used are not limited to trend, momentum, volume, volatility indicators, and sentiment analysis has also been used to gain useful insight combined with the above features. For Cross-validation, Purged Walk forward cross-validation has been used. In terms of accuracy, we have done a comparative analysis of the performance of Ensemble method with Stacking and Ensemble method with blending. We have also developed a methodology for combined features importance for the stacked model. Important indicators are also identified based on feature importance.