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Language Transfer for Early Warning of Epidemics from Social Media
Appelgren, Mattias, Schrempf, Patrick, Falis, Matúš, Ikeda, Satoshi, O'Neil, Alison Q
Statements on social media can be analysed to identify individuals who are experiencing red flag medical symptoms, allowing early detection of the spread of disease such as influenza. Since disease does not respect cultural borders and may spread between populations speaking different languages, we would like to build multilingual models. However, the data required to train models for every language may be difficult, expensive and time-consuming to obtain, particularly for low-resource languages. Taking Japanese as our target language, we explore methods by which data in one language might be used to build models for a different language. We evaluate strategies of training on machine translated data and of zero-shot transfer through the use of multilingual models. We find that the choice of source language impacts the performance, with Chinese-Japanese being a better language pair than English-Japanese. Training on machine translated data shows promise, especially when used in conjunction with a small amount of target language data.
Strategic Coalitions in Stochastic Games
The article introduces a notion of a stochastic game with failure states and proposes two logical systems with modality "coalition has a strategy to transition to a non-failure state with a given probability while achieving a given goal." The logical properties of this modality depend on whether the modal language allows the empty coalition. The main technical results are a completeness theorem for a logical system with the empty coalition, a strong completeness theorem for the logical system without the empty coalition, and an incompleteness theorem which shows that there is no strongly complete logical system in the language with the empty coalition.1. Introduction In this article we study coalition power in stochastic games. An example of such a game is the road situation depicted in Figure 1. In this situation, self-driving car a is trying to pass self-driving car b . Unexpectedly, a truck moving in the opposite direction appears on the road. For the sake of simplicity, we assume that cars a and b have only three strategies: slowdown (), maintain the current speed (0), and accelerate (). We also assume that the truck is too heavy to significantly change the speed before a possible collision. The diagram in Figure 2 describes probabilities of different outcomes of all possible combinations of actions of cars a and b . This diagram has five states: state p is the current ("passing") state of the system.
Contract Statements Knowledge Service for Chatbots
Ruf, Boris, Sammarco, Matteo, Detyniecki, Marcin
-- T owards conversational agents that are capable of handling more complex questions on contractual conditions, formalizing contract statements in a machine readable way is crucial. However, constructing a formal model which captures the full scope of a contract proves difficult due to the overall complexity its set of rules represent. Instead, this paper presents a top-down approach to the problem. A user-friendly tool we developed for this purpose allows to do so easily and at scale. Then, we expose the statements as service so they can get smoothly integrated in any chatbot framework. For a long time, researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) have been intrigued by the idea of developing a conversational agent that is capable of having a coherent conversation with humans [1]-[3]. Recent breakthroughs in semantics and speech recognition have given rise to hopes for robust solutions to the problem [4], [5]. Major information technology companies have released digital assistants and chatbot frameworks to facilitate the building of conversational agents [6], [7].
Causality and deceit: Do androids watch action movies?
Pavlovic, Dusko, Pavlovic, Temra
We seek causes through science, religion, and in everyday life. We get excited when a big rock causes a big splash, and we get scared when it tumbles without a cause. But our causal cognition is usually biased. The 'why' is influenced by the 'who'. It is influenced by the 'self', and by 'others'. We share rituals, we watch action movies, and we influence each other to believe in the same causes. Human mind is packed with subjectivity because shared cognitive biases bring us together. But they also make us vulnerable. An artificial mind is deemed to be more objective than the human mind. After many years of science-fiction fantasies about even-minded androids, they are now sold as personal or expert assistants, as brand advocates, as policy or candidate supporters, as network influencers. Artificial agents have been stunningly successful in disseminating artificial causal beliefs among humans. As malicious artificial agents continue to manipulate human cognitive biases, and deceive human communities into ostensive but expansive causal illusions, the hope for defending us has been vested into developing benevolent artificial agents, tasked with preventing and mitigating cognitive distortions inflicted upon us by their malicious cousins. Can the distortions of human causal cognition be corrected on a more solid foundation of artificial causal cognition? In the present paper, we study a simple model of causal cognition, viewed as a quest for causal models. We show that, under very mild and hard to avoid assumptions, there are always self-confirming causal models, which perpetrate self-deception, and seem to preclude a royal road to objectivity.
RLCard: A Toolkit for Reinforcement Learning in Card Games
Zha, Daochen, Lai, Kwei-Herng, Cao, Yuanpu, Huang, Songyi, Wei, Ruzhe, Guo, Junyu, Hu, Xia
RLCard is an open-source toolkit for reinforcement learning research in card games. It supports various card environments with easy-to-use interfaces, including Blackjack, Leduc Hold'em, Texas Hold'em, UNO, Dou Dizhu and Mahjong. The goal of RLCard is to bridge reinforcement learning and imperfect information games, and push forward the research of reinforcement learning in domains with multiple agents, large state and action space, and sparse reward. In this paper, we provide an overview of the key components in RLCard, a discussion of the design principles, a brief introduction of the interfaces, and comprehensive evaluations of the environments.
Asking Easy Questions: A User-Friendly Approach to Active Reward Learning
Bıyık, Erdem, Palan, Malayandi, Landolfi, Nicholas C., Losey, Dylan P., Sadigh, Dorsa
Robots can learn the right reward function by querying a human expert. Existing approaches attempt to choose questions where the robot is most uncertain about the human's response; however, they do not consider how easy it will be for the human to answer! In this paper we explore an information gain formulation for optimally selecting questions that naturally account for the human's ability to answer. Our approach identifies questions that optimize the trade-off between robot and human uncertainty, and determines when these questions become redundant or costly. Simulations and a user study show our method not only produces easy questions, but also ultimately results in faster reward learning.
Find or Classify? Dual Strategy for Slot-Value Predictions on Multi-Domain Dialog State Tracking
Zhang, Jian-Guo, Hashimoto, Kazuma, Wu, Chien-Sheng, Wan, Yao, Yu, Philip S., Socher, Richard, Xiong, Caiming
Dialog State Tracking (DST) is a core component in task-oriented dialog systems. Existing approaches for DST usually fall into two categories, i.e, the picklist-based and span-based. From one hand, the picklist-based methods perform classifications for each slot over a candidate-value list, under the condition that a pre-defined ontology is accessible. However, it is impractical in industry since it is hard to get full access to the ontology. On the other hand, the span-based methods track values for each slot through finding text spans in the dialog context. However, due to the diversity of value descriptions, it is hard to find a particular string in the dialog context. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes a Dual Strategy for DST (DS-DST) to borrow advantages from both the picklist-based and span-based methods, by classifying over a picklist or finding values from a slot span. Empirical results show that DS-DST achieves the state-of-the-art scores in terms of joint accuracy, i.e., 51.2% on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset, and 53.3% when the full ontology is accessible.
Towards Simplicity in Deep Reinforcement Learning: Streamlined Off-Policy Learning
Wang, Che, Wu, Yanqiu, Vuong, Quan, Ross, Keith
A BSTRACT The field of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has recently seen a surge in the popularity of maximum entropy reinforcement learning algorithms. Their popularity stems from the intuitive interpretation of the maximum entropy objective and their superior sample efficiency on standard benchmarks. In this paper, we seek to understand the primary contribution of the entropy term to the performance of maximum entropy algorithms. For the Mujoco benchmark, we demonstrate that the entropy term in Soft Actor Critic (SAC) principally addresses the bounded nature of the action spaces. With this insight, we propose a simple normalization scheme which allows a streamlined algorithm without entropy maximization match the performance of SAC. Our experimental results demonstrate a need to revisit the benefits of entropy regularization in DRL. We also propose a simple nonuniform sampling method for selecting transitions from the replay buffer during training. We further show that the streamlined algorithm with the simple nonuniform sampling scheme outperforms SAC and achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging continuous control tasks. 1 I NTRODUCTION Off-policy deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms aim to improve sample efficiency by reusing past experience. Recently a number of new off-policy Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms have been proposed for control tasks with continuous state and action spaces, including Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3) (Lillicrap et al., 2015; Fuji-moto et al., 2018). TD3, in particular, has been shown to be significantly more sample efficient than popular on-policy methods for a wide range of Mujoco benchmarks. The field of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has also recently seen a surge in the popularity of maximum entropy reinforcement learning algorithms. Their popularity stems from the intuitive interpretation of the maximum entropy objective and their superior sample efficiency on standard benchmarks.
New bill would require tech devices with hidden cameras or microphones to have a warning label
A new Senate bill would require tech companies to label internet-connected devices equipped with either a camera or microphone. Introduced by Cory Gardner, a Republican senator from Colorado, the Protecting Privacy in our Homes Act is intended to enhance consumer privacy as more and more tech devices come equipped with surveillance tools that aren't always obvious. The Federal Trade Commission would be responsible for creating the specific language for the label and for determining and enforcing penalties for non-compliance. Amazon's Alexa (pictured above) comes with a microphone that records users even when they're not using the device. The bill would exclude devices marketed specifically as cameras or microphones.
These Are the 10 Best Nintendo Switch Games to Play Right Now
The video games of the Nintendo Switch are some of the most varied, versatile, and strange on the market. You want a Mario game? Looking to lead Link through an adventure in Hyrule? From fighting games to shooters, from RPGs to visual novels, from indie darlings to big-budget experiences and everything in between, the Nintendo Switch has it all. Whether you want a game to play on the train or something to play on the big screen, It can be hard to choose.