Behavioral cues play a significant part in human communication and cognitive perception. In most professional domains, employee recruitment policies are framed such that both professional skills and personality traits are adequately assessed. Hiring interviews are structured to evaluate expansively a potential employee's suitability for the position - their professional qualifications, interpersonal skills, ability to perform in critical and stressful situations, in the presence of time and resource constraints, etc. Therefore, candidates need to be aware of their positive and negative attributes and be mindful of behavioral cues that might have adverse effects on their success. We propose a multimodal analytical framework that analyzes the candidate in an interview scenario and provides feedback for predefined labels such as engagement, speaking rate, eye contact, etc. We perform a comprehensive analysis that includes the interviewee's facial expressions, speech, and prosodic information, using the video, audio, and text transcripts obtained from the recorded interview. We use these multimodal data sources to construct a composite representation, which is used for training machine learning classifiers to predict the class labels. Such analysis is then used to provide constructive feedback to the interviewee for their behavioral cues and body language. Experimental validation showed that the proposed methodology achieved promising results.

In this paper, we study the task of embodied interactive learning for object detection. Given a set of environments (and some labeling budget), our goal is to learn an object detector by having an agent select what data to obtain labels for. How should an exploration policy decide which trajectory should be labeled? One possibility is to use a trained object detector's failure cases as an external reward. However, this will require labeling millions of frames required for training RL policies, which is infeasible. Instead, we explore a self-supervised approach for training our exploration policy by introducing a notion of semantic curiosity. Our semantic curiosity policy is based on a simple observation -- the detection outputs should be consistent. Therefore, our semantic curiosity rewards trajectories with inconsistent labeling behavior and encourages the exploration policy to explore such areas. The exploration policy trained via semantic curiosity generalizes to novel scenes and helps train an object detector that outperforms baselines trained with other possible alternatives such as random exploration, prediction-error curiosity, and coverage-maximizing exploration.

In e-commerce markets, on time delivery is of great importance to customer satisfaction. In this paper, we present a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach for deciding how and when orders should be batched and picked in a warehouse to minimize the number of tardy orders. In particular, the technique facilitates making decisions on whether an order should be picked individually (pick-by-order) or picked in a batch with other orders (pick-by-batch), and if so with which other orders. We approach the problem by formulating it as a semi-Markov decision process and develop a vector-based state representation that includes the characteristics of the warehouse system. This allows us to create a deep reinforcement learning solution that learns a strategy by interacting with the environment and solve the problem with a proximal policy optimization algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed DRL approach by comparing it with several batching and sequencing heuristics in different problem settings. The results show that the DRL approach is able to develop a strategy that produces consistent, good solutions and performs better than the proposed heuristics.

In this paper, we initiate the study of sample complexity of teaching, termed as "teaching dimension" (TDim) in the literature, for Q-learning. While the teaching dimension of supervised learning has been studied extensively, these results do not extend to reinforcement learning due to the temporal constraints posed by the underlying Markov Decision Process environment. We characterize the TDim of Q-learning under different teachers with varying control over the environment, and present matching optimal teaching algorithms. Our TDim results provide the minimum number of samples needed for reinforcement learning, thus complementing standard PAC-style RL sample complexity analysis. Our teaching algorithms have the potential to speed up RL agent learning in applications where a helpful teacher is available.

Non-stationarity arises in Reinforcement Learning (RL) even in stationary environments. Most RL algorithms collect new data throughout training, using a non-stationary behaviour policy. Furthermore, training targets in RL can change even with a fixed state distribution when the policy, critic, or bootstrap values are updated. We study these types of non-stationarity in supervised learning settings as well as in RL, finding that they can lead to worse generalisation performance when using deep neural network function approximators. Consequently, to improve generalisation of deep RL agents, we propose Iterated Relearning (ITER). ITER augments standard RL training by repeated knowledge transfer of the current policy into a freshly initialised network, which thereby experiences less non-stationarity during training. Experimentally, we show that ITER improves performance on the challenging generalisation benchmarks ProcGen and Multiroom.

Continually solving new, unsolved tasks is the key to learning diverse behaviors. Through reinforcement learning (RL), we have made massive strides towards solving tasks that have a single goal. However, in the multi-task domain, where an agent needs to reach multiple goals, the choice of training goals can largely affect sample efficiency. When biological agents learn, there is often an organized and meaningful order to which learning happens. Inspired by this, we propose setting up an automatic curriculum for goals that the agent needs to solve. Our key insight is that if we can sample goals at the frontier of the set of goals that an agent is able to reach, it will provide a significantly stronger learning signal compared to randomly sampled goals. To operationalize this idea, we introduce a goal proposal module that prioritizes goals that maximize the epistemic uncertainty of the Q-function of the policy. This simple technique samples goals that are neither too hard nor too easy for the agent to solve, hence enabling continual improvement. We evaluate our method across 13 multi-goal robotic tasks and 5 navigation tasks, and demonstrate performance gains over current state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, we consider large-scale finite-sum nonconvex problems arising from machine learning. Since the Hessian is often a summation of a relative cheap and accessible part and an expensive or even inaccessible part, a stochastic quasi-Newton matrix is constructed using partial Hessian information as much as possible. By further exploiting the low-rank structures based on the Nystr\"om approximation, the computation of the quasi-Newton direction is affordable. To make full use of the gradient estimation, we also develop an extra-step strategy for this framework. Global convergence to stationary point in expectation and local suplinear convergence rate are established under some mild assumptions. Numerical experiments on logistic regression, deep autoencoder networks and deep learning problems show that the efficiency of our proposed method is at least comparable with the state-of-the-art methods.

There is a wide variety of data mining methods available, and it is generally useful in exploratory data analysis to use many different methods for the same dataset. This, however, leads to the problem of whether the results found by one method are a reflection of the phenomenon shown by the results of another method, or whether the results depict in some sense unrelated properties of the data. For example, using clustering can give indication of a clear cluster structure, and computing correlations between variables can show that there are many significant correlations in the data. However, it can be the case that the correlations are actually determined by the cluster structure. In this paper, we consider the problem of randomizing data so that previously discovered patterns or models are taken into account. The randomization methods can be used in iterative data mining. At each step in the data mining process, the randomization produces random samples from the set of data matrices satisfying the already discovered patterns or models. That is, given a data set and some statistics (e.g., cluster centers or co-occurrence counts) of the data, the randomization methods sample data sets having similar values of the given statistics as the original data set. We use Metropolis sampling based on local swaps to achieve this. We describe experiments on real data that demonstrate the usefulness of our approach. Our results indicate that in many cases, the results of, e.g., clustering actually imply the results of, say, frequent pattern discovery.

Slate is now asking those who read the most to support our journalism more directly by subscribing to Slate Plus. Dear Prudence is online weekly to chat live with readers. Here's an edited transcript of this week's chat. I know it's a petty, marriage-killing thing to dwell on … but I'm smarter than my husband. Because he insisted we both get IQ tests. It turns out I qualify for MENSA and he just does not. Except now he's telling our friends his fairly impressive IQ and when they ask about me, he says: "Oh well, it doesn't really matter. What's important is how you use what God gave you."

With the ink hardly dry on the pages of the guidelines, a free online course exploring the issues they raise appeared on the openSAP platform. SAP's Creating Trustworthy and Ethical Artificial Intelligence was not just for stakeholders who design, develop, deploy, implement, use, and interact with AI or are affected by it, but also for the wider public. It is underpinned by the value that creating trustworthy and ethical artificial intelligence requires an understanding not only of the technology itself, but also the societal and ethical conditions present.