As machine learning (ML) systems have advanced, they have acquired more power over humans' lives, and questions about what values are embedded in them have become more complex and fraught. It is conceivable that in the coming decades, humans may succeed in creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) that thinks and acts with an open-endedness and autonomy comparable to that of humans. The implications would be profound for our species; they are now widely debated not just in science fiction and speculative research agendas but increasingly in serious technical and policy conversations. Much work is underway to try to weave ethics into advancing ML research. We think it useful to add the lens of parenting to these efforts, and specifically radical, queer theories of parenting that consciously set out to nurture agents whose experiences, objectives and understanding of the world will necessarily be very different from their parents'. We propose a spectrum of principles which might underpin such an effort; some are relevant to current ML research, while others will become more important if AGI becomes more likely. These principles may encourage new thinking about the development, design, training, and release into the world of increasingly autonomous agents.

Robots that are trained to perform a task in a fixed environment often fail when facing unexpected changes to the environment due to a lack of exploration. We propose a principled way to adapt the policy for better exploration in changing sparse-reward environments. Unlike previous works which explicitly model environmental changes, we analyze the relationship between the value function and the optimal exploration for a Gaussian-parameterized policy and show that our theory leads to an effective strategy for adjusting the variance of the policy, enabling fast adapt to changes in a variety of sparse-reward environments.

The aim of our study was to develop a method by which a social robot can greet passersby and get their attention without causing them to suffer discomfort.A number of customer services have recently come to be provided by social robots rather than people, including, serving as receptionists, guides, and exhibitors. Robot exhibitors, for example, can explain products being promoted by the robot owners. However, a sudden greeting by a robot can startle passersby and cause discomfort to passersby.Social robots should thus adapt their mannerisms to the situation they face regarding passersby.We developed a method for meeting this requirement on the basis of the results of related work. Our proposed method, user-centered reinforcement learning, enables robots to greet passersby and get their attention without causing them to suffer discomfort (p<0.01) .The results of an experiment in the field, an office entrance, demonstrated that our method meets this requirement.

Researchers have used distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) to model various multi-agent coordination and resource allocation problems. Very recently, Ottens et al. proposed a promising new approach to solve DCOPs that is based on confidence bounds via their Distributed UCT (DUCT) sampling-based algorithm. Unfortunately, its memory requirement per agent is exponential in the number of agents in the problem, which prohibits it from scaling up to large problems. Thus, in this article, we introduce two new sampling-based DCOP algorithms called Sequential Distributed Gibbs (SD-Gibbs) and Parallel Distributed Gibbs (PD-Gibbs). Both algorithms have memory requirements per agent that is linear in the number of agents in the problem. Our empirical results show that our algorithms can find solutions that are better than DUCT, run faster than DUCT, and solve some large problems that DUCT failed to solve due to memory limitations.

Discrepancy between training and testing domains is a fundamental problem in the generalization of machine learning techniques. Recently, several approaches have been proposed to learn domain invariant feature representations through adversarial deep learning. However, label shift, where the percentage of data in each class is different between domains, has received less attention. Label shift naturally arises in many contexts, especially in behavioral studies where the behaviors are freely chosen. In this work, we propose a method called Domain Adversarial nets for Target Shift (DATS) to address label shift while learning a domain invariant representation. This is accomplished by using distribution matching to estimate label proportions in a blind test set. We extend this framework to handle multiple domains by developing a scheme to upweight source domains most similar to the target domain. Empirical results show that this framework performs well under large label shift in synthetic and real experiments, demonstrating the practical importance.

We consider the recently proposed reinforcement learning (RL) framework of Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDP), where the agent has a sequence of episodic interactions with tabular environments chosen from a possibly infinite set. The parameters of these environments depend on a context vector that is available to the agent at the start of each episode. In this paper, we propose a no-regret online RL algorithm in the setting where the MDP parameters are obtained from the context using generalized linear models (GLMs). The proposed algorithm \texttt{GL-ORL} relies on efficient online updates and is also memory efficient. Our analysis of the algorithm gives new results in the logit link case and improves previous bounds in the linear case. Our algorithm uses efficient Online Newton Step updates to build confidence sets. Moreover, for any strongly convex link function, we also show a generic conversion from any online no-regret algorithm to confidence sets.

We propose a framework for learning discrete deterministic planning domains. In this framework, an agent learns the domain by observing the action effects through continuous features that describe the state of the environment after the execution of each action. Besides, the agent learns its perception function, i.e., a probabilistic mapping between state variables and sensor data represented as a vector of continuous random variables called perception variables. We define an algorithm that updates the planning domain and the perception function by (i) introducing new states, either by extending the possible values of state variables, or by weakening their constraints; (ii) adapts the perception function to fit the observed data (iii) adapts the transition function on the basis of the executed actions and the effects observed via the perception function. The framework is able to deal with exogenous events that happen in the environment.

Online learning has traditionally focused on the expected rewards. In this paper, a risk-averse online learning problem under the performance measure of the mean-variance of the rewards is studied. Both the bandit and full information settings are considered. The performance of several existing policies is analyzed, and new fundamental limitations on risk-averse learning is established. In particular, it is shown that although a logarithmic distribution-dependent regret in time $T$ is achievable (similar to the risk-neutral problem), the worst-case (i.e. minimax) regret is lower bounded by $\Omega(T)$ (in contrast to the $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ lower bound in the risk-neutral problem). This sharp difference from the risk-neutral counterpart is caused by the the variance in the player's decisions, which, while absent in the regret under the expected reward criterion, contributes to excess mean-variance due to the non-linearity of this risk measure. The role of the decision variance in regret performance reflects a risk-averse player's desire for robust decisions and outcomes.

Electronic health records are an increasingly important resource for understanding the interactions between patient health, environment, and clinical decisions. In this paper we report an empirical study of predictive modeling of several patient outcomes using three state-of-the-art machine learning methods. Our primary goal is to validate the models by interpreting the importance of predictors in the final models. Central to interpretation is the use of feature importance scores, which vary depending on the underlying methodology. In order to assess feature importance, we compared univariate statistical tests, information-theoretic measures, permutation testing, and normalized coefficients from multivariate logistic regression models. In general we found poor correlation between methods in their assessment of feature importance, even when their performance is comparable and relatively good. However, permutation tests applied to random forest and gradient boosting models showed the most agreement, and the importance scores matched the clinical interpretation most frequently.

Learning data representations that reflect the customers' creditworthiness can improve marketing campaigns, customer relationship management, data and process management or the credit risk assessment in retail banks. In this research, we adopt the Variational Autoencoder (VAE), which has the ability to learn latent representations that contain useful information. We show that it is possible to steer the latent representations in the latent space of the VAE using the Weight of Evidence and forming a specific grouping of the data that reflects the customers' creditworthiness. Our proposed method learns a latent representation of the data, which shows a well-defied clustering structure capturing the customers' creditworthiness. These clusters are well suited for the aforementioned banks' activities.