A BSTRACT We study the important and challenging problem of controllable generation of long-term sequential behaviors. Solutions to this problem would impact many applications, such as calibrating behaviors of AI agents in games or predicting player trajectories in sports. In contrast to the well-studied areas of controllable generation of images, text, and speech, there are significant challenges that are unique to or exacerbated by generating long-term behaviors: how should we specify the factors of variation to control, and how can we ensure that the generated temporal behavior faithfully demonstrates diverse styles? In this paper, we leverage large amounts of raw behavioral data to learn policies that can be calibrated to generate a diverse range of behavior styles (e.g., aggressive versus passive play in sports). Inspired by recent work on leveraging programmatic labeling functions, we present a novel framework that combines imitation learning with data programming to learn style-calibratable policies. Our primary technical contribution is a formal notion of style-consistency as a learning objective, and its integration with conventional imitation learning approaches. The tracking data is often obtained from multiple experts and can exhibit very diverse styles (e.g., aggressive versus passive play in sports). Our work is motivated by the opportunity to maximally leverage these datasets by cleanly extracting such styles in addition to modeling the raw behaviors.

Broad adoption of machine learning techniques has increased privacy concerns for models trained on sensitive data such as medical records. Existing techniques for training differentially private (DP) models give rigorous privacy guarantees, but applying these techniques to neural networks can severely degrade model performance. This performance reduction is an obstacle to deploying private models in the real world. In this work, we improve the performance of DP models by fine-tuning them through active learning on public data. We introduce two new techniques - DIVERSEPUBLIC and NEARPRIVATE - for doing this fine-tuning in a privacy-aware way. For the MNIST and SVHN datasets, these techniques improve state-of-the-art accuracy for DP models while retaining privacy guarantees.

Recent advances in many enabling technologies such as sensing, computing and communication are instrumental in achieving this objective. Real-time health monitoring enables transitioning from traditional fixed schedule preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance, where decisions regarding maintenance are based on an objective assessment of the equipment health. The reduction in price of sensors has enabled widespread adoption of sensor technology for health monitoring. In 2004 the average cost of sensors was $1.30 and in the year 2020, it is expected to come down to $0.38 [1]. Industries such as mining, transportation, and aerospace are among the leaders in adoption of sensor-enabled predictive maintenance.

In order to satisfy safety conditions, a reinforcement learned (RL) agent maybe constrained from acting freely, e.g., to prevent trajectories that might cause unwanted behavior or physical damage in a robot. We propose a general framework for augmenting a Markov decision process (MDP) with constraints that are described in formal languages over sequences of MDP states and agent actions. Constraint enforcement is implemented by filtering the allowed action set or by applying potential-based reward shaping to implement hard and soft constraint enforcement, respectively. We instantiate this framework using deterministic finite automata to encode constraints and propose methods of augmenting MDP observations with the state of the constraint automaton for learning. We empirically evaluate these methods with a variety of constraints by training Deep Q-Networks in Atari games as well as Proximal Policy Optimization in MuJoCo environments. We experimentally find that our approaches are effective in significantly reducing or eliminating constraint violations with either minimal negative or, depending on the constraint, a clear positive impact on final performance.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are distributed trainable systems whose computing elements, or neurons, are characterized by internal analog dynamics and by digital and sparse synaptic communications. The sparsity of the synaptic spiking inputs and the corresponding event-driven nature of neural processing can be leveraged by energy-efficient hardware implementations, which can offer significant energy reductions as compared to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). The design of training algorithms lags behind the hardware implementations. Most existing training algorithms for SNNs have been designed either for biological plausibility or through conversion from pretrained ANNs via rate encoding. This article provides an introduction to SNNs by focusing on a probabilistic signal processing methodology that enables the direct derivation of learning rules by leveraging the unique time-encoding capabilities of SNNs. We adopt discrete-time probabilistic models for networked spiking neurons and derive supervised and unsupervised learning rules from first principles via variational inference. Examples and open research problems are also provided.

On the other hand, few-shot learning methods are highly vulnerable to adversarial exam ples. The goal of our work is to produce networks which both perform well at few-sh ot tasks and are simultaneously robust to adversarial examples. W e adapt ad versarial training for meta-learning, we adapt robust architectural features to s mall networks for meta-learning, we test pre-processing defenses as an alternativ e to adversarial training for meta-learning, and we investigate the advantages of rob ust meta-learning over robust transfer-learning for few-shot tasks. This work pro vides a thorough analysis of adversarially robust methods in the context of meta-lear ning, and we lay the foundation for future work on defenses for few-shot tasks. Conventional adversarial train ing and pre-processing defenses aim to produce networks that resist attack (Madry et al., 2017; Zhang e t al., 2019; Samangouei et al., 2018), but such defenses rely heavily on the availability of large t raining datasets. In applications that require few-shot learning, such as face recognition from few images, recognition of a v ideo source from a single clip, or recognition of a new object from few exa mple photos, the conventional robust training pipeline breaks down.

Classifiers are among the most widely used supervised machine learning algorithms. Many classification models exist, and choosing the right one for a given task is difficult. During model selection and debugging, data scientists need to asses classifier performance, evaluate the training behavior over time, and compare different models. Typically, this analysis is based on single-number performance measures such as accuracy. A more detailed evaluation of classifiers is possible by inspecting class errors. The confusion matrix is an established way for visualizing these class errors, but it was not designed with temporal or comparative analysis in mind. More generally, established performance analysis systems do not allow a combined temporal and comparative analysis of class-level information. To address this issue, we propose ConfusionFlow, an interactive, comparative visualization tool that combines the benefits of class confusion matrices with the visualization of performance characteristics over time. ConfusionFlow is model-agnostic and can be used to compare performances for different model types, model architectures, and/or training and test datasets. We demonstrate the usefulness of ConfusionFlow in the context of two practical problems: an analysis of the influence of network pruning on model errors, and a case study on instance selection strategies in active learning.

In this work, we propose a simple model that provides permutation invariant maximally predictive prototype generator from a given dataset, which leads to interpretability of the solution and concrete insights to the nature and the solution of a problem. Our aim is to find out prototypes in the feature space to map the collection of instances (i.e. bags) to a distance feature space and simultaneously learn a linear classifier for multiple instance learning (MIL). Our experiments on classical MIL benchmark datasets demonstrate that proposed framework is an accurate and efficient classifier compared to the existing approaches.

Progress of machine learning in critical care has been difficult to track, in part due to absence of public benchmarks. Other fields of research (such as vision and NLP) have already established various competitions and benchmarks, whereas only recent availability of large clinical datasets has enabled the possibility of public benchmarks. Taking advantage of this opportunity, we propose a public benchmark suite to address four areas of critical care, namely mortality prediction, estimation of length of stay, patient phenotyping and risk of decompensation. We define each task and compare the performance of both clinical models as well as baseline and deep models using eICU critical care dataset of around 73,000 patients. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of numerical variables as well as handling of categorical variables for each of the defined tasks.

Graph autoencoders (AE) and variational autoencoders (V AE) recently emerged as powerful node embedding methods, with promising perform ances on challenging tasks such as link prediction and node clustering. Graph AE, V AE and most of their extensions rely on graph convolutional networks (G CN) to learn vector space representations of nodes. In this paper, we propose to replace the GCN encoder by a simple linear model w.r.t. the adjacency matrix of the graph. For the two aforementioned tasks, we empirically show that this app roach consistently reaches competitive performances w.r.t. GCN-based models for numerous real-world graphs, including the widely used Cora, Citeseer and P ubmed citation networks that became the de facto benchmark datasets for evaluating graph AE and V AE. This result questions the relevance of repeatedly usin g these three datasets to compare complex graph AE and V AE models. It also emphasizes t he effectiveness of simple node encoding schemes for many real-world applica tions.