Education
How to implement data-centric AI in NLP
Andrew Ng, a distinguished influencer in today's AI world, brings his new movement to the AI world, namely an approach called "data-centric AI". He and his ventures often spread the word. Many times, he explains the importance of implementing the approach. In this article, we're going to discover what he means by "data-centric AI" and how to implement it in NLP task. "Data-centric AI is the discipline of systematically engineering the data used to build an AI system."
What managers should expect from Data Scientists
Data Science has entered the world of big companies, where data is. Managers of such companies often ask things that they don't actually need and forget to pretend the only useful things to have. "I want an algorithm per month". Yes, I once heard somebody saying something like that and I'm afraid I'm not alone. How many times did a manager ask you to build algorithms?
Impact Makes a Sound and Sound Makes an Impact: Sound Guides Representations and Explorations
Zhao, Xufeng, Weber, Cornelius, Hafez, Muhammad Burhan, Wermter, Stefan
Sounds are generally much more distinctive compared Research in the field of neuroscience shows that with multiple with visual events. For some specific tasks related to physical cues from a diverse range of sensory modalities comes properties estimation, the sound alone is reliable to guide enhanced behavioral performance towards faster response, a robot and measure its performance [12]. For others, it more accurate movement, and a better sense of stimulus [1]. may be informative but not sufficient, e.g., a classification When presented with multiple modalities, e.g., a combination of objects that share common auditory properties [13], or of auditory, haptic, and visual perception, an observer will precise control of a water-pouring robot [14]. In this case, make the assumption of unity that decides whether the sounds are supposed to fuse with other sensory inputs to multimodal information originates from a common source or present a much more robust description of states, or to from some separated objects and events [2]. The perception scaffold the agent's exploration. of unity arises when the perceiver assumes that a physical There are more chances that sound is abundantly distributed event is redundantly expressed and sensed across diverse while hardly considered for general manipulations modalities, and decisions are commonly made based on the due to the facts that 1) vision is content-rich and is thus temporal and spatial consistency of information [3], or on sufficient for traditional planning-based robots so the sound semantic congruence factors [1].
Safe Data Collection for Offline and Online Policy Learning
Zhu, Ruihao, Kveton, Branislav
Motivated by practical needs of experimentation and policy learning in online platforms, we study the problem of safe data collection. Specifically, our goal is to develop a logging policy that efficiently explores different actions to elicit information while achieving competitive reward with a baseline production policy. We first show that a common practice of mixing the production policy with randomized exploration, despite being safe, is sub-optimal in maximizing information gain. Then, we propose a safe optimal logging policy via a novel water-filling technique for the case when no side information about the actions' expected reward is available. We improve upon this design by considering side information and also extend our approaches to the linear contextual model to account for a large number of actions. Along the way, we analyze how our data logging policies impact errors in off(line)-policy learning and empirically validate the benefit of our design by conducting extensive numerical experiments with synthetic and MNIST datasets. To further demonstrate the generality of our approach, we also consider the safe online learning setting. By adaptively applying our techniques, we develop the Safe Phased-Elimination (SafePE) algorithm that can achieve optimal regret bound with only logarithmic number of policy updates.
Memetic algorithms for Spatial Partitioning problems
Biswas, Subhodip, Chen, Fanglan, Chen, Zhiqian, Lu, Chang-Tien, Ramakrishnan, Naren
Spatial optimization problems (SOPs) are characterized by spatial relationships governing the decision variables, objectives, and/or constraint functions. In this article, we focus on a specific type of SOP called spatial partitioning, which is a combinatorial problem due to the presence of discrete spatial units. Exact optimization methods do not scale with the size of the problem, especially within practicable time limits. This motivated us to develop population-based metaheuristics for solving such SOPs. However, the search operators employed by these population-based methods are mostly designed for real-parameter continuous optimization problems. For adapting these methods to SOPs, we apply domain knowledge in designing spatially-aware search operators for efficiently searching through the discrete search space while preserving the spatial constraints. To this end, we put forward a simple yet effective algorithm called swarm-based spatial memetic algorithm (SPATIAL) and test it on the school (re)districting problem. Detailed experimental investigations are performed on real-world datasets to evaluate the performance of SPATIAL. Besides, ablation studies are performed to understand the role of the individual components of SPATIAL. Additionally, we discuss how SPATIAL~is helpful in the real-life planning process and its applicability to different scenarios and motivate future research directions.
QC-ODKLA: Quantized and Communication-Censored Online Decentralized Kernel Learning via Linearized ADMM
Xu, Ping, Wang, Yue, Chen, Xiang, Tian, Zhi
This paper focuses on online kernel learning over a decentralized network. Each agent in the network receives continuous streaming data locally and works collaboratively to learn a nonlinear prediction function that is globally optimal in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space with respect to the total instantaneous costs of all agents. In order to circumvent the curse of dimensionality issue in traditional online kernel learning, we utilize random feature (RF) mapping to convert the non-parametric kernel learning problem into a fixed-length parametric one in the RF space. We then propose a novel learning framework named Online Decentralized Kernel learning via Linearized ADMM (ODKLA) to efficiently solve the online decentralized kernel learning problem. To further improve the communication efficiency, we add the quantization and censoring strategies in the communication stage and develop the Quantized and Communication-censored ODKLA (QC-ODKLA) algorithm. We theoretically prove that both ODKLA and QC-ODKLA can achieve the optimal sublinear regret $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ over $T$ time slots. Through numerical experiments, we evaluate the learning effectiveness, communication, and computation efficiencies of the proposed methods.
FedDRL: Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Adaptive Aggregation for Non-IID Data in Federated Learning
Nguyen, Nang Hung, Nguyen, Phi Le, Nguyen, Duc Long, Nguyen, Trung Thanh, Nguyen, Thuy Dung, Pham, Huy Hieu, Nguyen, Truong Thao
The uneven distribution of local data across different edge devices (clients) results in slow model training and accuracy reduction in federated learning. Naive federated learning (FL) strategy and most alternative solutions attempted to achieve more fairness by weighted aggregating deep learning models across clients. This work introduces a novel non-IID type encountered in real-world datasets, namely cluster-skew, in which groups of clients have local data with similar distributions, causing the global model to converge to an over-fitted solution. To deal with non-IID data, particularly the cluster-skewed data, we propose FedDRL, a novel FL model that employs deep reinforcement learning to adaptively determine each client's impact factor (which will be used as the weights in the aggregation process). Extensive experiments on a suite of federated datasets confirm that the proposed FedDRL improves favorably against FedAvg and FedProx methods, e.g., up to 4.05% and 2.17% on average for the CIFAR-100 dataset, respectively.
Exploring Generative Neural Temporal Point Process
Lin, Haitao, Wu, Lirong, Zhao, Guojiang, Liu, Pai, Li, Stan Z.
Temporal point process (TPP) is commonly used to model the asynchronous event sequence featuring occurrence timestamps and revealed by probabilistic models conditioned on historical impacts. While lots of previous works have focused on `goodness-of-fit' of TPP models by maximizing the likelihood, their predictive performance is unsatisfactory, which means the timestamps generated by models are far apart from true observations. Recently, deep generative models such as denoising diffusion and score matching models have achieved great progress in image generating tasks by demonstrating their capability of generating samples of high quality. However, there are no complete and unified works exploring and studying the potential of generative models in the context of event occurence modeling for TPP. In this work, we try to fill the gap by designing a unified \textbf{g}enerative framework for \textbf{n}eural \textbf{t}emporal \textbf{p}oint \textbf{p}rocess (\textsc{GNTPP}) model to explore their feasibility and effectiveness, and further improve models' predictive performance. Besides, in terms of measuring the historical impacts, we revise the attentive models which summarize influence from historical events with an adaptive reweighting term considering events' type relation and time intervals. Extensive experiments have been conducted to illustrate the improved predictive capability of \textsc{GNTPP} with a line of generative probabilistic decoders, and performance gain from the revised attention. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that adapts generative models in a complete unified framework and studies their effectiveness in the context of TPP. Our codebase including all the methods given in Section.5.1.1 is open in \url{https://github.com/BIRD-TAO/GNTPP}. We hope the code framework can facilitate future research in Neural TPPs.
Towards Augmented Microscopy with Reinforcement Learning-Enhanced Workflows
Xu, Michael, Kumar, Abinash, LeBeau, James M.
Here, we report a case study implementation of reinforcement learning (RL) to automate operations in the scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) workflow. To do so, we design a virtual, prototypical RL environment to test and develop a network to autonomously align the electron beam without prior knowledge. Using this simulator, we evaluate the impact of environment design and algorithm hyperparameters on alignment accuracy and learning convergence, showing robust convergence across a wide hyperparameter space. Additionally, we deploy a successful model on the microscope to validate the approach and demonstrate the value of designing appropriate virtual environments. Consistent with simulated results, the on-microscope RL model achieves convergence to the goal alignment after minimal training. Overall, the results highlight that by taking advantage of RL, microscope operations can be automated without the need for extensive algorithm design, taking another step towards augmenting electron microscopy with machine learning methods.