Overview
MARLlib: A Scalable and Efficient Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Library
Hu, Siyi, Zhong, Yifan, Gao, Minquan, Wang, Weixun, Dong, Hao, Liang, Xiaodan, Li, Zhihui, Chang, Xiaojun, Yang, Yaodong
A significant challenge facing researchers in the area of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) pertains to the identification of a library that can offer fast and compatible development for multi-agent tasks and algorithm combinations, while obviating the need to consider compatibility issues. In this paper, we present MARLlib, a library designed to address the aforementioned challenge by leveraging three key mechanisms: 1) a standardized multi-agent environment wrapper, 2) an agent-level algorithm implementation, and 3) a flexible policy mapping strategy. By utilizing these mechanisms, MARLlib can effectively disentangle the intertwined nature of the multi-agent task and the learning process of the algorithm, with the ability to automatically alter the training strategy based on the current task's attributes.
Approximating Langevin Monte Carlo with ResNet-like Neural Network architectures
Eigel, Martin, Miranda, Charles, Schรผtte, Janina, Sommer, David
We sample from a given target distribution by constructing a neural network which maps samples from a simple reference, e.g. the standard normal distribution, to samples from the target. To that end, we propose using a neural network architecture inspired by the Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm. Based on LMC perturbation results, we show approximation rates of the proposed architecture for smooth, log-concave target distributions measured in the Wasserstein-$2$ distance. The analysis heavily relies on the notion of sub-Gaussianity of the intermediate measures of the perturbed LMC process. In particular, we derive bounds on the growth of the intermediate variance proxies under different assumptions on the perturbations. Moreover, we propose an architecture similar to deep residual neural networks and derive expressivity results for approximating the sample to target distribution map.
QualEval: Qualitative Evaluation for Model Improvement
Murahari, Vishvak, Deshpande, Ameet, Clark, Peter, Rajpurohit, Tanmay, Sabharwal, Ashish, Narasimhan, Karthik, Kalyan, Ashwin
Quantitative evaluation metrics have traditionally been pivotal in gauging the advancements of artificial intelligence systems, including large language models (LLMs). However, these metrics have inherent limitations. Given the intricate nature of real-world tasks, a single scalar to quantify and compare is insufficient to capture the fine-grained nuances of model behavior. Metrics serve only as a way to compare and benchmark models, and do not yield actionable diagnostics, thus making the model improvement process challenging. Model developers find themselves amid extensive manual efforts involving sifting through vast datasets and attempting hit-or-miss adjustments to training data or setups. In this work, we address the shortcomings of quantitative metrics by proposing QualEval, which augments quantitative scalar metrics with automated qualitative evaluation as a vehicle for model improvement. QualEval uses a powerful LLM reasoner and our novel flexible linear programming solver to generate human-readable insights that when applied, accelerate model improvement. The insights are backed by a comprehensive dashboard with fine-grained visualizations and human-interpretable analyses. We corroborate the faithfulness of QualEval by demonstrating that leveraging its insights, for example, improves the absolute performance of the Llama 2 model by up to 15% points relative on a challenging dialogue task (DialogSum) when compared to baselines. QualEval successfully increases the pace of model development, thus in essence serving as a data-scientist-in-a-box. Given the focus on critiquing and improving current evaluation metrics, our method serves as a refreshingly new technique for both model evaluation and improvement.
Evaluating Neuron Interpretation Methods of NLP Models
Fan, Yimin, Dalvi, Fahim, Durrani, Nadir, Sajjad, Hassan
Neuron Interpretation has gained traction in the field of interpretability, and have provided fine-grained insights into what a model learns and how language knowledge is distributed amongst its different components. However, the lack of evaluation benchmark and metrics have led to siloed progress within these various methods, with very little work comparing them and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. The reason for this discrepancy is the difficulty of creating ground truth datasets, for example, many neurons within a given model may learn the same phenomena, and hence there may not be one correct answer. Moreover, a learned phenomenon may spread across several neurons that work together -- surfacing these to create a gold standard challenging. In this work, we propose an evaluation framework that measures the compatibility of a neuron analysis method with other methods. We hypothesize that the more compatible a method is with the majority of the methods, the more confident one can be about its performance. We systematically evaluate our proposed framework and present a comparative analysis of a large set of neuron interpretation methods. We make the evaluation framework available to the community. It enables the evaluation of any new method using 20 concepts and across three pre-trained models.The code is released at https://github.com/fdalvi/neuron-comparative-analysis
Barron Space for Graph Convolution Neural Networks
Graph convolutional neural network (GCNN) operates on graph domain and it has achieved a superior performance to accomplish a wide range of tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Barron space of functions on a compact domain of graph signals. We prove that the proposed Barron space is a reproducing kernel Banach space, it can be decomposed into the union of a family of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces with neuron kernels, and it could be dense in the space of continuous functions on the domain. Approximation property is one of the main principles to design neural networks. In this paper, we show that outputs of GCNNs are contained in the Barron space and functions in the Barron space can be well approximated by outputs of some GCNNs in the integrated square and uniform measurements. We also estimate the Rademacher complexity of functions with bounded Barron norm and conclude that functions in the Barron space could be learnt from their random samples efficiently.
Dense Video Captioning: A Survey of Techniques, Datasets and Evaluation Protocols
Qasim, Iqra, Horsch, Alexander, Prasad, Dilip K.
More recently, developing 2D and 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has sparked interest in studying static and dynamic visual media's encoding, captioning, and query-answering capabilities. However, accomplishing these tasks on long, unedited video significantly challenges computer vision. Dense video captioning aims to make a computer understand what is happening in a video and establish a relation between the video content and its meaningful natural language description. The capability of describing events in videos aids a variety of systems, including blind navigation, video searching, surveillance, medical image analysis, and automatic video subtitling. The urge to detect captions on images and videos started in 1970 when researchers began working with images and video snippets containing captions. The art of displaying text on images and video transcribing the audio is called closed captioning. To serve the consumers who are hard of hearing and to take part in technology improvement motivated researchers to develop some automatic caption detection systems [92, 152].
Uncertainty Quantification of Deep Learning for Spatiotemporal Data: Challenges and Opportunities
With the advancement of GPS, remote sensing, and computational simulations, large amounts of geospatial and spatiotemporal data are being collected at an increasing speed. Such emerging spatiotemporal big data assets, together with the recent progress of deep learning technologies, provide unique opportunities to transform society. However, it is widely recognized that deep learning sometimes makes unexpected and incorrect predictions with unwarranted confidence, causing severe consequences in high-stake decision-making applications (e.g., disaster management, medical diagnosis, autonomous driving). Uncertainty quantification (UQ) aims to estimate a deep learning model's confidence. This paper provides a brief overview of UQ of deep learning for spatiotemporal data, including its unique challenges and existing methods. We particularly focus on the importance of uncertainty sources. We identify several future research directions for spatiotemporal data.
Digital Twins for Human-Robot Collaboration: A Future Perspective
Shaaban, Mohamad, Carfรฌ, Alessandro, Mastrogiovanni, Fulvio
As collaborative robot (Cobot) adoption in many sectors grows, so does the interest in integrating digital twins in human-robot collaboration (HRC). Virtual representations of physical systems (PT) and assets, known as digital twins, can revolutionize human-robot collaboration by enabling real-time simulation, monitoring, and control. In this article, we present a review of the state-of-the-art and our perspective on the future of digital twins (DT) in human-robot collaboration. We argue that DT will be crucial in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of these systems by presenting compelling evidence and a concise vision of the future of DT in human-robot collaboration, as well as insights into the possible advantages and challenges associated with their integration.
AI-based Self-healing Solutions Applied to Cellular Networks: An Overview
Farmani, Jaleh, Zadeh, Amirreza Khalil
In this article, we provide an overview of machine learning (ML) methods, both classical and deep variants, that are used to implement self-healing for cell outages in cellular networks. Self-healing is a promising approach to network management, which aims to detect and compensate for cell outages in an autonomous way. This technology aims to decrease the expenses associated with the installation and maintenance of existing 4G and 5G, i.e. emerging 6G networks by simplifying operational tasks through its ability to heal itself. We provide an overview of the basic concepts and taxonomy for SON, self-healing, and ML techniques, in network management. Moreover, we review the state-of-the-art in literature for cell outages, with a particular emphasis on ML-based approaches.
Federated Learning and Meta Learning: Approaches, Applications, and Directions
Liu, Xiaonan, Deng, Yansha, Nallanathan, Arumugam, Bennis, Mehdi
Over the past few years, significant advancements have been made in the field of machine learning (ML) to address resource management, interference management, autonomy, and decision-making in wireless networks. Traditional ML approaches rely on centralized methods, where data is collected at a central server for training. However, this approach poses a challenge in terms of preserving the data privacy of devices. To address this issue, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an effective solution that allows edge devices to collaboratively train ML models without compromising data privacy. In FL, local datasets are not shared, and the focus is on learning a global model for a specific task involving all devices. However, FL has limitations when it comes to adapting the model to devices with different data distributions. In such cases, meta learning is considered, as it enables the adaptation of learning models to different data distributions using only a few data samples. In this tutorial, we present a comprehensive review of FL, meta learning, and federated meta learning (FedMeta). Unlike other tutorial papers, our objective is to explore how FL, meta learning, and FedMeta methodologies can be designed, optimized, and evolved, and their applications over wireless networks. We also analyze the relationships among these learning algorithms and examine their advantages and disadvantages in real-world applications.