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Neural Additive Models: Interpretable Machine Learning with Neural Nets

Neural Information Processing Systems

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful black-box predictors that have achieved impressive performance on a wide variety of tasks. However, their accuracy comes at the cost of intelligibility: it is usually unclear how they make their decisions. This hinders their applicability to high stakes decision-making domains such as healthcare. We propose Neural Additive Models (NAMs) which combine some of the expressivity of DNNs with the inherent intelligibility of generalized additive models. NAMs learn a linear combination of neural networks that each attend to a single input feature.


Faster Directional Convergence of Linear Neural Networks under Spherically Symmetric Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we study gradient methods for training deep linear neural networks with binary cross-entropy loss. In particular, we show global directional convergence guarantees from a polynomial rate to a linear rate for (deep) linear networks with spherically symmetric data distribution, which can be viewed as a specific zero-margin dataset. Our results do not require the assumptions in other works such as small initial loss, presumed convergence of weight direction, or overparameterization. We also characterize our findings in experiments.



Exploration-Guided Reward Shaping for Reinforcement Learning under Sparse Rewards

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of reward shaping to accelerate the training process of a reinforcement learning agent. Existing works have considered a number of different reward shaping formulations; however, they either require external domain knowledge or fail in environments with extremely sparse rewards. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Exploration-Guided Reward Shaping (EXPLORS), that operates in a fully self-supervised manner and can accelerate an agent's learning even in sparse-reward environments. The key idea of EXPLORS is to learn an intrinsic reward function in combination with exploration-based bonuses to maximize the agent's utility w.r.t.


Exploration-Guided Reward Shaping for Reinforcement Learning under Sparse Rewards

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of reward shaping to accelerate the training process of a reinforcement learning agent. Existing works have considered a number of different reward shaping formulations; however, they either require external domain knowledge or fail in environments with extremely sparse rewards. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Exploration-Guided Reward Shaping (EXPLORS), that operates in a fully self-supervised manner and can accelerate an agent's learning even in sparse-reward environments. The key idea of EXPLORS is to learn an intrinsic reward function in combination with exploration-based bonuses to maximize the agent's utility w.r.t.


Appendix

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this appendix, we first introduce the datasets and evaluation metrics used in the experiments in Section A. Then, we provide extra experimental results in Section B. In Section C, we present details of network design, training scheme, and hyper-parameter tuning. We conduct experiments on 11 popular time series datasets: (1) Electricity Transformer Temperature [42] (ETTh(1,2),ETTm1) 3consists of 2 year electric power data collected from two separated counties of China. Each data point includes an "oil temperature" value and 6 power load features. The data is aggregated into 5-minutes windows, resulting in 12 points per hour and 288 points per day. A.1 Electricity Transformer Temperature (ETT) For data pre-processing, we perform zero-mean normalization, i.e., X We use Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) [17] and Mean Squared Errors (MSE) [26] for model comparison.


Flexible Option Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning (RL), offers the promise of improving generalization and knowledge transfer in complex environments, by propagating information more efficiently over time. Although option learning was initially formulated in a way that allows updating many options simultaneously, using off-policy, intra-option learning (Sutton, Precup & Singh, 1999), many of the recent hierarchical reinforcement learning approaches only update a single option at a time: the option currently executing. We revisit and extend intra-option learning in the context of deep reinforcement learning, in order to enable updating all options consistent with current primitive action choices, without introducing any additional estimates. Our method can therefore be naturally adopted in most hierarchical RL frameworks. When we combine our approach with the option-critic algorithm for option discovery, we obtain significant improvements in performance and data-efficiency across a wide variety of domains.