Education
Perhaps PTLMs Should Go to School -- A Task to Assess Open Book and Closed Book QA
Ciosici, Manuel R., Cecil, Joe, Hedges, Alex, Lee, Dong-Ho, Freedman, Marjorie, Weischedel, Ralph
Our goal is to deliver a new task and leaderboard to stimulate research on question answering and pre-trained language models (PTLMs) to understand a significant instructional document, e.g., an introductory college textbook or a manual. PTLMs have shown great success in many question-answering tasks, given significant supervised training, but much less so in zero-shot settings. We propose a new task that includes two college-level introductory texts in the social sciences (American Government 2e) and humanities (U.S. History), hundreds of true/false statements based on review questions written by the textbook authors, validation/development tests based on the first eight chapters of the textbooks, blind tests based on the remaining textbook chapters, and baseline results given state-of-the-art PTLMs. Since the questions are balanced, random performance should be ~50%. T5, fine-tuned with BoolQ achieves the same performance, suggesting that the textbook's content is not pre-represented in the PTLM. Taking the exam closed book, but having read the textbook (i.e., adding the textbook to T5's pre-training), yields at best minor improvement (56%), suggesting that the PTLM may not have "understood" the textbook (or perhaps misunderstood the questions). Performance is better (~60%) when the exam is taken open-book (i.e., allowing the machine to automatically retrieve a paragraph and use it to answer the question).
Skill Induction and Planning with Latent Language
Sharma, Pratyusha, Torralba, Antonio, Andreas, Jacob
We present a framework for learning hierarchical policies from demonstrations, using sparse natural language annotations to guide the discovery of reusable skills for autonomous decision-making. We formulate a generative model of action sequences in which goals generate sequences of high-level subtask descriptions, and these descriptions generate sequences of low-level actions. We describe how to train this model using primarily unannotated demonstrations by parsing demonstrations into sequences of named high-level subtasks, using only a small number of seed annotations to ground language in action. In trained models, the space of natural language commands indexes a combinatorial library of skills; agents can use these skills to plan by generating high-level instruction sequences tailored to novel goals. We evaluate this approach in the ALFRED household simulation environment, providing natural language annotations for only 10% of demonstrations. It completes more than twice as many tasks as a standard approach to learning from demonstrations, matching the performance of instruction following models with access to ground-truth plans during both training and evaluation.
Learning to Assist Agents by Observing Them
Keurulainen, Antti, Westerlund, Isak, Kaski, Samuel, Ilin, Alexander
The ability of an AI agent to assist other agents, such as humans, is an important and challenging goal, which requires the assisting agent to reason about the behavior and infer the goals of the assisted agent. Training such an ability by using reinforcement learning usually requires large amounts of online training, which is difficult and costly. On the other hand, offline data about the behavior of the assisted agent might be available, but is non-trivial to take advantage of by methods such as offline reinforcement learning. We introduce methods where the capability to create a representation of the behavior is first pre-trained with offline data, after which only a small amount of interaction data is needed to learn an assisting policy. We test the setting in a gridworld where the helper agent has the capability to manipulate the environment of the assisted artificial agents, and introduce three different scenarios where the assistance considerably improves the performance of the assisted agents.
A Review of the Gumbel-max Trick and its Extensions for Discrete Stochasticity in Machine Learning
Huijben, Iris A. M., Kool, Wouter, Paulus, Max B., van Sloun, Ruud J. G.
The Gumbel-max trick is a method to draw a sample from a categorical distribution, given by its unnormalized (log-)probabilities. Over the past years, the machine learning community has proposed several extensions of this trick to facilitate, e.g., drawing multiple samples, sampling from structured domains, or gradient estimation for error backpropagation in neural network optimization. The goal of this survey article is to present background about the Gumbel-max trick, and to provide a structured overview of its extensions to ease algorithm selection. Moreover, it presents a comprehensive outline of (machine learning) literature in which Gumbel-based algorithms have been leveraged, reviews commonly-made design choices, and sketches a future perspective.
Causality and Generalizability: Identifiability and Learning Methods
This PhD thesis contains several contributions to the field of statistical causal modeling. Statistical causal models are statistical models embedded with causal assumptions that allow for the inference and reasoning about the behavior of stochastic systems affected by external manipulation (interventions). This thesis contributes to the research areas concerning the estimation of causal effects, causal structure learning, and distributionally robust (out-of-distribution generalizing) prediction methods. We present novel and consistent linear and non-linear causal effects estimators in instrumental variable settings that employ data-dependent mean squared prediction error regularization. Our proposed estimators show, in certain settings, mean squared error improvements compared to both canonical and state-of-the-art estimators. We show that recent research on distributionally robust prediction methods has connections to well-studied estimators from econometrics. This connection leads us to prove that general K-class estimators possess distributional robustness properties. We, furthermore, propose a general framework for distributional robustness with respect to intervention-induced distributions. In this framework, we derive sufficient conditions for the identifiability of distributionally robust prediction methods and present impossibility results that show the necessity of several of these conditions. We present a new structure learning method applicable in additive noise models with directed trees as causal graphs. We prove consistency in a vanishing identifiability setup and provide a method for testing substructure hypotheses with asymptotic family-wise error control that remains valid post-selection. Finally, we present heuristic ideas for learning summary graphs of nonlinear time-series models.
Glass Identification - Projects Based Learning
From USA Forensic Science Service; 6 types of glass; defined in terms of their oxide content (i.e. The study of the classification of types of glass was motivated by the criminological investigation. At the scene of the crime, the glass left can be used as evidence…if it is correctly identified! Convert String data to Numeric format so we can process the data in Apache Spark ML Library. Welcome to this project on predicting the type of Glass in Apache Spark Machine Learning using Databricks platform community edition server which allows you to execute your spark code, free of cost on their server just by registering through email id.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOUNDATIONS OF COMPUTATIONAL AGENTS
Abduction is a form of reasoning where assumptions are made to explain observations. For example, if an agent were to observe that some light was not working, it can hypothesize what is happening in the world to explain why the light was not working. An intelligent tutoring system could try to explain why a student gives some answer in terms of what the student understands and does not understand. The term abduction was coined by Peirce (1839-1914) to differentiate this type of reasoning from deduction, which involves determining what logically follows from a set of axioms, and induction, which involves inferring general relationships from examples. In abduction, an agent hypothesizes what may be true about an observed case.
How to Learn From Streaming Data with Creme in Python?
In a traditional paradigm of machine learning, we often work in the offline learning fashion where we start with data preprocessing and end with data modelling with an algorithm to satisfy the requirements. This becomes a storage-dependent and time-consuming process. To overcome this, we can use streaming data for predictive analysis or any other modelling process. We don't need to store the data before modelling it. This can be accomplished by stream learning and online learning.
Robert Wood's Plenary Talk: Soft robotics for delicate and dexterous manipulation
Robotic grasping and manipulation has historically been dominated by rigid grippers, force/form closure constraints, and extensive grasp trajectory planning. The advent of soft robotics offers new avenues to diverge from this paradigm by using strategic compliance to passively conform to grasped objects in the absence of active control, and with minimal chance of damage to the object or surrounding environment. However, while the reduced emphasis on sensing, planning, and control complexity simplifies grasping and manipulation tasks, precision and dexterity are often lost. This talk will discuss efforts to increase the robustness of soft grasping and the dexterity of soft robotic manipulators, with particular emphasis on grasping tasks that are challenging for more traditional robot hands. This includes compliant objects, thin flexible sheets, and delicate organisms.
Machine Learning & Deep Learning In Python & R
You're looking for a complete Machine Learning and Deep Learning course that can help you launch a flourishing career in the field of Data Science & Machine Learning, right? You've found the right Machine Learning course! Check out the table of contents below to see what all Machine Learning and Deep Learning models you are going to learn. How this course will help you? A Verifiable Certificate of Completion is presented to all students who undertake this Machine learning basics course.