The benefit of multi-task learning over single-task learning relies on the ability to use relations across tasks to improve performance on any single task. While sharing representations is an important mechanism to share information across tasks, its success depends on how well the structure underlying the tasks is captured. In some real-world situations, we have access to metadata, or additional information about a task, that may not provide any new insight in the context of a single task setup alone but inform relations across multiple tasks. While this metadata can be useful for improving multi-task learning performance, effectively incorporating it can be an additional challenge. We posit that an efficient approach to knowledge transfer is through the use of multiple context-dependent, composable representations shared across a family of tasks. In this framework, metadata can help to learn interpretable representations and provide the context to inform which representations to compose and how to compose them. We use the proposed approach to obtain state-of-the-art results in Meta-World, a challenging multi-task benchmark consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks.

Abstract--Real-world applications have been dealing with large amounts of data that arrive over time and generally present changes in their underlying joint probability distribution, i.e., concept drift. Concept drift can be subdivided into two types: virtual drift, which affects the unconditional probability distribution p(x), and real drift, which affects the conditional probability distribution p(y x) . Existing works focuses on real drift. However, strategies to cope with real drift may not be the best suited for dealing with virtual drift, since the real class boundaries remain unchanged. We provide the first in depth analysis of the differences between the impact of virtual and real drifts on classifiers' suitability. We propose an approach to handle both drifts called On-line Gaussian Mixture Model With Noise Filter For Handling Virtual and Real Concept Drifts (OGMMF-VRD). Experiments with 7 synthetic and 3 real-world datasets show that OGMMF-VRD obtained the best results in terms of average accuracy, G-mean and runtime compared to existing approaches. Moreover, its accuracy over time suffered less performance degradation in the presence of drifts. In recent years, real-world applications like credit card learned decision boundaries, which need to be adjusted for fraud detection, flight delay and weather forecasting have the classifier to remain suitable. Such sequences of data are known as data stream learning approaches treat virtual drifts using data streams [2, 3]. They are challenging for data modeling the same strategies as for real drifts [6].

We are launching the third topic in our focus series on the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). In March we will start publishing posts relating the goal of "quality education", which is SDG number four on the UN list. We are looking for researchers, users and stakeholders to write, or talk, about their work. If you are interested in communicating your education-related efforts to a wider audience then please do get in touch. Likewise, if you would like to make recommendations for people or specific topics we should feature, just send us an email.

As technology and automation rapidly remake a very different future of work, some economists predict that women will benefit the most from the coming disruptions. Although women have no doubt been hardest hit by the COVID-19 economy, in the coming years, women-dominated caring jobs--like nursing, teaching, and providing child and elder care--that aren't easily replaced by machines will be among the fastest-growing occupations and thus more likely to be "future-proof." It's not that many women's jobs won't be automated away. Just as men-dominated mechanical and machine operating jobs are predicted to disappear, so too are women-dominated administrative and clerical jobs. But most of these future-of-work predictions assume women will continue to dominate the care economy. And all because men aren't expected to care.

We consider the problem of solving nonlinear optimization programs with stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints. We assume for the objective that the function evaluation, the gradient, and the Hessian are inaccessible, while one can compute their stochastic estimates by, for example, subsampling. We propose a stochastic algorithm based on sequential quadratic programming (SQP) that uses a differentiable exact augmented Lagrangian as the merit function. To motivate our algorithm, we revisit an old SQP method \citep{Lucidi1990Recursive} developed for deterministic programs. We simplify that method and derive an adaptive SQP, which serves as the skeleton of our stochastic algorithm. Based on the derived algorithm, we then propose a non-adaptive SQP for optimizing stochastic objectives, where the gradient and the Hessian are replaced by stochastic estimates but the stepsize is deterministic and prespecified. Finally, we incorporate a recent stochastic line search procedure \citep{Paquette2020Stochastic} into our non-adaptive stochastic SQP to arrive at an adaptive stochastic SQP. To our knowledge, the proposed algorithm is the first stochastic SQP that allows a line search procedure and the first stochastic line search procedure that allows the constraints. The global convergence for all proposed SQP methods is established, while numerical experiments on nonlinear problems in the CUTEst test set demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

We develop Stratified Shortest Solution Imitation Learning (3SIL) to learn equational theorem proving in a deep reinforcement learning (RL) setting. The self-trained models achieve state-of-the-art performance in proving problems generated by one of the top open conjectures in quasigroup theory, the Abelian Inner Mapping (AIM) Conjecture. To develop the methods, we first use two simpler arithmetic rewriting tasks that share tree-structured proof states and sparse rewards with the AIM problems. On these tasks, 3SIL is shown to significantly outperform several established RL and imitation learning methods. The final system is then evaluated in a standalone and cooperative mode on the AIM problems. The standalone 3SIL-trained system proves in 60 seconds more theorems (70.2%) than the complex, hand-engineered Waldmeister system (65.5%). In the cooperative mode, the final system is combined with the Prover9 system, proving in 2 seconds what standalone Prover9 proves in 60 seconds.

Communication at terahertz (THz) frequency bands is a promising solution for achieving extremely high data rates in next-generation wireless networks. While the THz communication is conventionally envisioned for short-range wireless applications due to the high atmospheric absorption at THz frequencies, multi-hop directional transmissions can be enabled to extend the communication range. However, to realize multi-hop THz communications, conventional beam training schemes, such as exhaustive search or hierarchical methods with a fixed number of training levels, can lead to a very large time overhead. To address this challenge, in this paper, a novel hierarchical beam training scheme with dynamic training levels is proposed to optimize the performance of multi-hop THz links. In fact, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the overall spectral efficiency of the multi-hop THz link by dynamically and jointly selecting the number of beam training levels across all the constituent single-hop links. To solve this problem in presence of unknown channel state information, noise, and path loss, a new reinforcement learning solution based on the multi-armed bandit (MAB) is developed. Simulation results show the fast convergence of the proposed scheme in presence of random channels and noise. The results also show that the proposed scheme can yield up to 75% performance gain, in terms of spectral efficiency, compared to the conventional hierarchical beam training with a fixed number of training levels.

Reinforcement learning is about learning agent models that make the best sequential decisions in unknown environments. In an unknown environment, the agent needs to explore the environment while exploiting the collected information, which usually forms a sophisticated problem to solve. Derivative-free optimization, meanwhile, is capable of solving sophisticated problems. It commonly uses a sampling-and-updating framework to iteratively improve the solution, where exploration and exploitation are also needed to be well balanced. Therefore, derivative-free optimization deals with a similar core issue as reinforcement learning, and has been introduced in reinforcement learning approaches, under the names of learning classifier systems and neuroevolution/evolutionary reinforcement learning. Although such methods have been developed for decades, recently, derivative-free reinforcement learning exhibits attracting increasing attention. However, recent survey on this topic is still lacking. In this article, we summarize methods of derivative-free reinforcement learning to date, and organize the methods in aspects including parameter updating, model selection, exploration, and parallel/distributed methods. Moreover, we discuss some current limitations and possible future directions, hoping that this article could bring more attentions to this topic and serve as a catalyst for developing novel and efficient approaches.

The development of neuromorphic hardware and modeling of biological neural networks requires algorithms with local learning rules. Artificial neural networks using local learning rules to perform principal subspace analysis (PSA) and clustering have recently been derived from principled objective functions. However, no biologically plausible networks exist for minor subspace analysis (MSA), a fundamental signal processing task. MSA extracts the lowest-variance subspace of the input signal covariance matrix. Here, we introduce a novel similarity matching objective for extracting the minor subspace, Minor Subspace Similarity Matching (MSSM). Moreover, we derive an adaptive MSSM algorithm that naturally maps onto a novel neural network with local learning rules and gives numerical results showing that our method converges at a competitive rate.

Multi-turn dialogue reading comprehension aims to teach machines to read dialogue contexts and solve tasks such as response selection and answering questions. The major challenges involve noisy history contexts and especial prerequisites of commonsense knowledge that is unseen in the given material. Existing works mainly focus on context and response matching approaches. This work thus makes the first attempt to tackle the above two challenges by extracting substantially important turns as pivot utterances and utilizing external knowledge to enhance the representation of context. We propose a pivot-oriented deep selection model (PoDS) on top of the Transformer-based language models for dialogue comprehension. In detail, our model first picks out the pivot utterances from the conversation history according to the semantic matching with the candidate response or question, if any. Besides, knowledge items related to the dialogue context are extracted from a knowledge graph as external knowledge. Then, the pivot utterances and the external knowledge are combined with a well-designed mechanism for refining predictions. Experimental results on four dialogue comprehension benchmark tasks show that our proposed model achieves great improvements on baselines. A series of empirical comparisons are conducted to show how our selection strategies and the extra knowledge injection influence the results.