Education
Reinforcement Learning for Trading Strategies
In the final course from the Machine Learning for Trading specialization, you will be introduced to reinforcement learning (RL) and the benefits of using reinforcement learning in trading strategies. You will learn how RL has been integrated with neural networks and review LSTMs and how they can be applied to time series data. By the end of the course, you will be able to build trading strategies using reinforcement learning, differentiate between actor-based policies and value-based policies, and incorporate RL into a momentum trading strategy. To be successful in this course, you should have advanced competency in Python programming and familiarity with pertinent libraries for machine learning, such as Scikit-Learn, StatsModels, and Pandas. Experience with SQL is recommended.
AI based mentor network Quantel ends FY23 with net revenue of Rs 2.1 crore; boasts of 1,000 mentors
The impact of a skilled mentor on one's life can be significant, potentially resulting in a successful career or business growth. Quantel, an AI-based mentor network platform, aims to offer mentorship opportunities to students from a diverse range of backgrounds, including government officers and corporate leaders, Lucky Rohilla, co-founder, Quantel, told FE Education. "We will bring on board mentors who possess exceptional capabilities and can effectively share their experiences with bright young minds who aspire to follow in their footsteps" Rohilla added. Incorporated in June 2020, Quantel is a recently established platform. The company ended FY22 with Rs 21.3 lakh from sales or supply of services, while net profit stood at Rs 30,324 as per regulatory filings accessed by business intelligence platform, Tofler.
The Future of Work: How AI is Changing the Software Development Landscape
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making waves across various industries, and the field of software development is no exception. As AI continues to advance, it is crucial for developers to understand the implications of these changes and adapt to the new landscape. In this post, we will explore the impact of AI on software development, the evolving job market, and the skills developers need to succeed in this ever-changing environment. The advent of AI has introduced a new level of automation within the software development lifecycle, streamlining various tasks and improving efficiency. In this section, we will delve into the ways AI is automating key aspects of the development process, from code generation to bug detection and optimization.
Quantifying the Benefit of Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research
The ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has the potential to change almost every line of work. As AI capabilities continue to improve in accuracy, robustness, and reach, AI may outperform and even replace human experts across many valuable tasks. Despite enormous efforts devoted to understanding AI's impact on labor and the economy and its recent success in accelerating scientific discovery and progress, we lack a systematic understanding of how advances in AI may benefit scientific research across disciplines and fields. Here we develop a measurement framework to estimate both the direct use of AI and the potential benefit of AI in scientific research by applying natural language processing techniques to 87.6 million publications and 7.1 million patents. We find that the use of AI in research appears widespread throughout the sciences, growing especially rapidly since 2015, and papers that use AI exhibit an impact premium, more likely to be highly cited both within and outside their disciplines. While almost every discipline contains some subfields that benefit substantially from AI, analyzing 4.6 million course syllabi across various educational disciplines, we find a systematic misalignment between the education of AI and its impact on research, suggesting the supply of AI talents in scientific disciplines is not commensurate with AI research demands. Lastly, examining who benefits from AI within the scientific workforce, we find that disciplines with a higher proportion of women or black scientists tend to be associated with less benefit, suggesting that AI's growing impact on research may further exacerbate existing inequalities in science. As the connection between AI and scientific research deepens, our findings may have an increasing value, with important implications for the equity and sustainability of the research enterprise.
Leveraging Deep Reinforcement Learning for Metacognitive Interventions across Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Abdelshiheed, Mark, Hostetter, John Wesley, Barnes, Tiffany, Chi, Min
This work compares two approaches to provide metacognitive interventions and their impact on preparing students for future learning across Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). In two consecutive semesters, we conducted two classroom experiments: Exp. 1 used a classic artificial intelligence approach to classify students into different metacognitive groups and provide static interventions based on their classified groups. In Exp. 2, we leveraged Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to provide adaptive interventions that consider the dynamic changes in the student's metacognitive levels. In both experiments, students received these interventions that taught how and when to use a backward-chaining (BC) strategy on a logic tutor that supports a default forward-chaining strategy. Six weeks later, we trained students on a probability tutor that only supports BC without interventions. Our results show that adaptive DRL-based interventions closed the metacognitive skills gap between students. In contrast, static classifier-based interventions only benefited a subset of students who knew how to use BC in advance. Additionally, our DRL agent prepared the experimental students for future learning by significantly surpassing their control peers on both ITSs.
Impossibility of Characterizing Distribution Learning -- a simple solution to a long-standing problem
Lechner, Tosca, Ben-David, Shai
We consider the long-standing question of finding a parameter of a class of probability distributions that characterizes its PAC learnability. We provide a rather surprising answer - no such parameter exists. Our techniques allow us to show similar results for several general notions of characterizing learnability and for several learning tasks. We show that there is no notion of dimension that characterizes the sample complexity of learning distribution classes. We then consider the weaker requirement of only characterizing learnability (rather than the quantitative sample complexity function). We propose some natural requirements for such a characterization and go on to show that there exists no characterization of learnability that satisfies these requirements for classes of distributions. Furthermore, we show that our results hold for various other learning problems. In particular, we show that there is no notion of dimension characterizing (or characterization of learnability) for any of the tasks: classification learning for distribution classes, learning of binary classifications w.r.t. a restricted set of marginal distributions, and learnability of classes of real-valued functions with continuous losses.
Hyper-Decision Transformer for Efficient Online Policy Adaptation
Xu, Mengdi, Lu, Yuchen, Shen, Yikang, Zhang, Shun, Zhao, Ding, Gan, Chuang
Decision Transformers (DT) have demonstrated strong performances in offline reinforcement learning settings, but quickly adapting to unseen novel tasks remains challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a new framework, called Hyper-Decision Transformer (HDT), that can generalize to novel tasks from a handful of demonstrations in a data-and parameter-efficient manner. To achieve such a goal, we propose to augment the base DT with an adaptation module, whose parameters are initialized by a hyper-network. When encountering unseen tasks, the hyper-network takes a handful of demonstrations as inputs and initializes the adaptation module accordingly. This initialization enables HDT to efficiently adapt to novel tasks by only fine-tuning the adaptation module. We validate HDT's generalization capability on object manipulation tasks. We find that with a single expert demonstration and fine-tuning only 0.5% of DT parameters, HDT adapts faster to unseen tasks than fine-tuning the whole DT model. Finally, we explore a more challenging setting where expert actions are not available, and we show that HDT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of task success rates by a large margin. Demos are available on our project page. Building an autonomous agent capable of generalizing to novel tasks has been a longstanding goal of artificial intelligence. Recently, large transformer models have shown strong generalization capability on language understanding when fine-tuned with limited data (Brown et al., 2020; Wei et al., 2021). Such success motivates researchers to apply transformer models to the regime of offline reinforcement learning (RL) (Chen et al., 2021; Janner et al., 2021).
LED: A Dataset for Life Event Extraction from Dialogs
Chen, Yi-Pei, Yen, An-Zi, Huang, Hen-Hsen, Nakayama, Hideki, Chen, Hsin-Hsi
Lifelogging has gained more attention due to its wide applications, such as personalized recommendations or memory assistance. The issues of collecting and extracting personal life events have emerged. People often share their life experiences with others through conversations. However, extracting life events from conversations is rarely explored. In this paper, we present Life Event Dialog, a dataset containing fine-grained life event annotations on conversational data. In addition, we initiate a novel conversational life event extraction task and differentiate the task from the public event extraction or the life event extraction from other sources like microblogs. We explore three information extraction (IE) frameworks to address the conversational life event extraction task: OpenIE, relation extraction, and event extraction. A comprehensive empirical analysis of the three baselines is established. The results suggest that the current event extraction model still struggles with extracting life events from human daily conversations. Our proposed life event dialog dataset and in-depth analysis of IE frameworks will facilitate future research on life event extraction from conversations.
A New Path: Scaling Vision-and-Language Navigation with Synthetic Instructions and Imitation Learning
Kamath, Aishwarya, Anderson, Peter, Wang, Su, Koh, Jing Yu, Ku, Alexander, Waters, Austin, Yang, Yinfei, Baldridge, Jason, Parekh, Zarana
Recent studies in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) train RL agents to execute natural-language navigation instructions in photorealistic environments, as a step towards robots that can follow human instructions. However, given the scarcity of human instruction data and limited diversity in the training environments, these agents still struggle with complex language grounding and spatial language understanding. Pretraining on large text and image-text datasets from the web has been extensively explored but the improvements are limited. We investigate large-scale augmentation with synthetic instructions. We take 500+ indoor environments captured in densely-sampled 360 degree panoramas, construct navigation trajectories through these panoramas, and generate a visually-grounded instruction for each trajectory using Marky, a high-quality multilingual navigation instruction generator. We also synthesize image observations from novel viewpoints using an image-to-image GAN. The resulting dataset of 4.2M instruction-trajectory pairs is two orders of magnitude larger than existing human-annotated datasets, and contains a wider variety of environments and viewpoints. To efficiently leverage data at this scale, we train a simple transformer agent with imitation learning. On the challenging RxR dataset, our approach outperforms all existing RL agents, improving the state-of-the-art NDTW from 71.1 to 79.1 in seen environments, and from 64.6 to 66.8 in unseen test environments. Our work points to a new path to improving instruction-following agents, emphasizing large-scale imitation learning and the development of synthetic instruction generation capabilities.
VALOR: Vision-Audio-Language Omni-Perception Pretraining Model and Dataset
Chen, Sihan, He, Xingjian, Guo, Longteng, Zhu, Xinxin, Wang, Weining, Tang, Jinhui, Liu, Jing
In this paper, we propose a Vision-Audio-Language Omni-peRception pretraining model (VALOR) for multi-modal understanding and generation. Different from widely-studied vision-language pretraining models, VALOR jointly models relationships of vision, audio and language in an end-to-end manner. It contains three separate encoders for single modality representations, and a decoder for multimodal conditional text generation. We design two pretext tasks to pretrain VALOR model, including Multimodal Grouping Alignment (MGA) and Multimodal Grouping Captioning (MGC). MGA projects vision, language and audio to the same common space, building vision-language, audio-language and audiovisual-language alignment simultaneously. MGC learns how to generate text tokens in conditions of vision, audio or their both. To promote vision-audio-language pretraining research, we construct a large-scale high-quality tri-modality dataset named VALOR-1M, which contains 1M audiable videos with human annotated audiovisual captions. Extensive experiments show that VALOR can learn strong multimodal correlations and be generalized to various downstream tasks (e.g., retrieval, captioning and question answering), with different input modalities (e.g., vision-language, audio-language and audiovisual-language). VALOR achieves new state-of-the-art performances on series of public cross-modality benchmarks. Code and data are available at project page https://casia-iva-group.github.io/projects/VALOR.