Genre
Celebrating Diversity in Shared Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning
Recently, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown the promise to solve complex cooperative tasks. Its success is partly because of parameter sharing among agents. However, such sharing may lead agents to behave similarly and limit their coordination capacity. In this paper, we aim to introduce diversity in both optimization and representation of shared multi-agent reinforcement learning. Specifically, we propose an information-theoretical regularization to maximize the mutual information between agents' identities and their trajectories, encouraging extensive exploration and diverse individualized behaviors. In representation, we incorporate agent-specific modules in the shared neural network architecture, which are regularized by L1-norm to promote learning sharing among agents while keeping necessary diversity. Empirical results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Google Research Football and super hard StarCraft II micromanagement tasks .
Divide and Contrast: Source-free Domain Adaptation via Adaptive Contrastive Learning
We investigate a practical domain adaptation task, called source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA), where the source pretrained model is adapted to the target domain without access to the source data. Existing techniques mainly leverage self-supervised pseudo-labeling to achieve class-wise global alignment [1] or rely on local structure extraction that encourages the feature consistency among neighborhoods [2]. While impressive progress has been made, both lines of methods have their own drawbacks - the "global" approach is sensitive to noisy labels while the "local" counterpart suffers from the source bias. In this paper, we present Divide and Contrast (DaC), a new paradigm for SFUDA that strives to connect the good ends of both worlds while bypassing their limitations. Based on the prediction confidence of the source model, DaC divides the target data into source-like and target-specific samples, where either group of samples is treated with tailored goals under an adaptive contrastive learning framework. Specifically, the source-like samples are utilized for learning global class clustering thanks to their relatively clean labels. The more noisy target-specific data are harnessed at the instance level for learning the intrinsic local structures. We further align the sourcelike domain with the target-specific samples using a memory-based maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) loss to reduce the distribution mismatch. Extensive experiments on VisDA, Office-Home, and the more challenging DomainNet have verified the superior performance of DaC over current state-of-the-art approaches.
Mixed Supervised Object Detection by Transferring Mask Prior and Semantic Similarity
Object detection has achieved promising success, but requires large-scale fullyannotated data, which is time-consuming and labor-extensive. Therefore, we consider object detection with mixed supervision, which learns novel object categories using weak annotations with the help of full annotations of existing base object categories. Previous works using mixed supervision mainly learn the classagnostic objectness from fully-annotated categories, which can be transferred to upgrade the weak annotations to pseudo full annotations for novel categories. In this paper, we further transfer mask prior and semantic similarity to bridge the gap between novel categories and base categories. Specifically, the ability of using mask prior to help detect objects is learned from base categories and transferred to novel categories. Moreover, the semantic similarity between objects learned from base categories is transferred to denoise the pseudo full annotations for novel categories. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over existing methods.
Privately Learning Mixtures of Axis-Aligned Gaussians
We consider the problem of learning mixtures of Gaussians under the constraint of approximate differential privacy. We prove that eO(k2dlog3/2(1/δ)/α2ε) samples are sufficient to learn a mixture of k axis-aligned Gaussians in Rd to within total variation distance αwhile satisfying (ε,δ)-differential privacy. This is the first result for privately learning mixtures of unbounded axis-aligned (or even unbounded univariate) Gaussians. If the covariance matrices of each of the Gaussians is the identity matrix, we show that eO(kd/α2 + kdlog(1/δ)/αε) samples are sufficient. To prove our results, we design a new technique for privately learning mixture distributions. A class of distributions F is said to be list-decodable if there is an algorithm that, given "heavily corrupted" samples from f F, outputs a list of distributions one of which approximates f. We show that if F is privately list-decodable then we can learn mixtures of distributions in F. Finally, we show axis-aligned Gaussian distributions are privately list-decodable, thereby proving mixtures of such distributions are privately learnable.