This paper presents Acquisition Thompson Sampling (ATS), a novel algorithm for batch Bayesian Optimization (BO) based on the idea of sampling multiple acquisition functions from a stochastic process. We define this process through the dependency of the acquisition functions on a set of model parameters. ATS is conceptually simple, straightforward to implement and, unlike other batch BO methods, it can be employed to parallelize any sequential acquisition function. In order to improve performance for multi-modal tasks, we show that ATS can be combined with existing techniques in order to realize different explore-exploit trade-offs and take into account pending function evaluations. We present experiments on a variety of benchmark functions and on the hyper-parameter optimization of a popular gradient boosting tree algorithm. These demonstrate the competitiveness of our algorithm with two state-of-the-art batch BO methods, and its advantages to classical parallel Thompson Sampling for BO.

Step sizes in neural network training are largely determined using predetermined rules such as fixed learning rates and learning rate schedules, which require user input to determine their functional form and associated hyperparameters. Global optimization strategies to resolve these hyperparameters are computationally expensive. Line searches are capable of adaptively resolving learning rate schedules. However, due to discontinuities induced by mini-batch sampling, they have largely fallen out of favor. Notwithstanding, probabilistic line searches have recently demonstrated viability in resolving learning rates for stochastic loss functions. This method creates surrogates with confidence intervals, where restrictions are placed on the rate at which the search domain can grow along a search direction. This paper introduces an alternative paradigm, Gradient-Only Line Searches that are inexact (GOLS-I), as an alternative strategy to automatically resolve learning rates in stochastic cost functions over a range of 15 orders of magnitude without the use of surrogates. We show that GOLS-I is a competitive strategy to reliably resolve step sizes, adding high value in terms of performance, while being easy to implement. Considering mini-batch sampling, we open the discussion on how to split the effort to resolve quality search directions from quality step size estimates along a search direction.

For autonomous agents to successfully operate in real world, the ability to anticipate future motions of surrounding entities in the scene can greatly enhance their safety levels since potentially dangerous situations could be avoided in advance. While impressive results have been shown on predicting each agent's behavior independently, we argue that it is not valid to consider road entities individually since transitions of vehicle states are highly coupled. Moreover, as the predicted horizon becomes longer, modeling prediction uncertainties and multi-modal distributions over future sequences will turn into a more challenging task. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting a multi-modal probabilistic prediction approach. The proposed method is based on a generative model and is capable of jointly predicting sequential motions of each pair of interacting agents. Most importantly, our model is interpretable, which can explain the underneath logic as well as obtain more reliability to use in real applications. A complicate real-world roundabout scenario is utilized to implement and examine the proposed method.

In stochastic differential games, a Nash equilibrium refers to strategies by which no player has an incentive to deviate. Finding a Nash equilibrium is one of the core problems in noncooperative game theory, however, due to the notorious intractability of N-player game, the computation of the Nash equilibrium has been shown extremely time-consuming and memory demanding, especially for large N [16]. On the other hand, a rich literature on game theory has been developed to study consequences of strategies on interactions between a large group of rational "agents", e.g., system risk caused by inter-bank borrowing and lending, price impacts imposed by agents' optimal liquidation, and market price from monopolistic competition. This makes it crucial to develop efficient theory and fast algorithms for computing the Nash equilibrium of N-player stochastic differential games. Deep neural networks with many layers have been recently shown to do a great job in artificial intelligence (e.g., [2, 39]). The idea behind is to use compositions of simple functions to approximate complicated ones, and there are approximation theorems showing that a wide class of functions on compact subsets can be approximated by a single hidden layer neural network (e.g., [53]). This brings a possibility of solving a high-dimensional system using deep neural networks, and in fact, these techniques have been successfully applied to solve stochastic control problems [20, 29, 1]. In this paper, we propose to build deep neural networks by using strategies of fictitious play, and develop deep learning algorithms for computing the Nash equilibrium of asymmetric N-player non-zerosum stochastic differential games.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease in older people. Despite considerable efforts to find a cure for AD, there is a 99.6% failure rate of clinical trials for AD drugs, likely because AD patients cannot easily be identified at early stages. This project investigated machine learning approaches to predict the clinical state of patients in future years to benefit AD research. Clinical data from 1737 patients was obtained from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database and was processed using the "All-Pairs" technique, a novel methodology created for this project involving the comparison of all possible pairs of temporal data points for each patient. This data was then used to train various machine learning models. Models were evaluated using 7-fold cross-validation on the training dataset and confirmed using data from a separate testing dataset (110 patients). A neural network model was effective (mAUC = 0.866) at predicting the progression of AD on a month-by-month basis, both in patients who were initially cognitively normal and in patients suffering from mild cognitive impairment. Such a model could be used to identify patients at early stages of AD and who are therefore good candidates for clinical trials for AD therapeutics.

While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have seen huge successes in image synthesis tasks, they are notoriously difficult to use, in part due to instability during training. One commonly accepted reason for this instability is that gradients passing from the discriminator to the generator can quickly become uninformative, due to a learning imbalance during training. In this work, we propose the Multi-Scale Gradient Generative Adversarial Network (MSG-GAN), a simple but effective technique for addressing this problem which allows the flow of gradients from the discriminator to the generator at multiple scales. This technique provides a stable approach for generating synchronized multi-scale images. We present a very intuitive implementation of the mathematical MSG-GAN framework which uses the concatenation operation in the discriminator computations. We empirically validate the effect of our MSG-GAN approach through experiments on the CIFAR10 and Oxford102 flowers datasets and compare it with other relevant techniques which perform multi-scale image synthesis. In addition, we also provide details of our experiment on CelebA-HQ dataset for synthesizing 1024 x 1024 high resolution images.

Machine learning has been applied to a number of creative, design-oriented tasks. However, it remains unclear how to best empower human users with these machine learning approaches, particularly those users without technical expertise. In this paper we propose a general framework for turn-based interaction between human users and AI agents designed to support human creativity, called {co-creative systems}. The framework can be used to better understand the space of possible designs of co-creative systems and reveal future research directions. We demonstrate how to apply this framework in conjunction with a pair of recent human subject studies, comparing between the four human-AI systems employed in these studies and generating hypotheses towards future studies.

The recommender system is an important form of intelligent application, which assists users to alleviate from information redundancy. Among the metrics used to evaluate a recommender system, the metric of conversion has become more and more important. The majority of existing recommender systems perform poorly on the metric of conversion due to its extremely sparse feedback signal. To tackle this challenge, we propose a deep hierarchical reinforcement learning based recommendation framework, which consists of two components, i.e., high-level agent and low-level agent. The high-level agent catches long-term sparse conversion signals, and automatically sets abstract goals for low-level agent, while the low-level agent follows the abstract goals and interacts with real-time environment. To solve the inherent problem in hierarchical reinforcement learning, we propose a novel deep hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm via multi-goals abstraction (HRL-MG). Our proposed algorithm contains three characteristics: 1) the high-level agent generates multiple goals to guide the low-level agent in different stages, which reduces the difficulty of approaching high-level goals; 2) different goals share the same state encoder parameters, which increases the update frequency of the high-level agent and thus accelerates the convergence of our proposed algorithm; 3) an appreciate benefit assignment function is designed to allocate rewards in each goal so as to coordinate different goals in a consistent direction. We evaluate our proposed algorithm based on a real-world e-commerce dataset and validate its effectiveness.

Get ready gamers: Google is ready to take on Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo in the gaming space. At the annual Game Developers Conference the technology giant announced its new Stadia gaming platform, looking to make it easier to not just make video games but play them on any screen you own including phones, computers and TVs. Stadia, which will launch later in 2019, promises new ways to connect with games including a Play button on YouTube videos that will launch you from the video into that game. Google demonstrated the new platform at the annual event Tuesday in San Francisco. While showing a video of the game "Assassin's Creed Odyssey," it was shown how a "Play" button on the YouTube video could transport the viewer right into the game.

For most people who talk to our technology -- whether it's Amazon's Alexa, Apple Siri or the Google Assistant -- the voice that talks back sounds female. Some people do choose to hear a male voice. Now, researchers have unveiled a new gender-neutral option: Q. "One of our big goals with Q was to contribute to a global conversation about gender, and about gender and technology and ethics, and how to be inclusive for people that identify in all sorts of different ways," says Julie Carpenter, an expert in human behavior and emerging technologies who worked on developing Project Q. The voice of Q was developed by a team of researchers, sound designers and linguists in conjunction with the organizers of Copenhagen Pride week, technology leaders in an initiative called Equal AI and others. They first recorded dozens of voices of people -- those who identify as male, female, transgender or nonbinary.