This story was published in partnership with The Moonshot Catalog. In the late 1960s, Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon posed the following thought exercise: Imagine you are an alien from Mars visiting a college on Earth, and you spend a day observing how professors teach their students. Simon argued that you would describe the process as "outrageous." "If we visited an organization responsible for designing, building and maintaining large bridges, we would expect to find employed there a number of trained and experienced professional engineers, thoroughly educated in mechanics and the other laws of nature that determine whether a bridge will stand or fall," he wrote in a 1967 issue of Education Record. "We find no one with a professional knowledge in the laws of learning, or the techniques for applying them," he wrote. Teaching at colleges is often done without any formal training. Mimicry of others who are equally untrained, instinct, and what feels right tend to provide the guidance. As a result, teaching is, to use another building metaphor, not up to code. There are widespread beliefs about the best way to teach and learn that have been proven wrong by science, yet they persist. Reading back over a textbook or taking lecture notes with a highlighter at the ready is often done by students, for instance, but these practices have proven of limited merit, and in some cases even counterproductive in aiding recall.

Existing research into online multi-label classification, such as online sequential multi-label extreme learning machine (OSML-ELM) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD), has achieved promising performance. However, these works do not take label dependencies into consideration and lack a theoretical analysis of loss functions. Accordingly, we propose a novel online metric learning paradigm for multi-label classification to fill the current research gap. Generally, we first propose a new metric for multi-label classification which is based on $k$-Nearest Neighbour ($k$NN) and combined with large margin principle. Then, we adapt it to the online settting to derive our model which deals with massive volume ofstreaming data at a higher speed online. Specifically, in order to learn the new $k$NN-based metric, we first project instances in the training dataset into the label space, which make it possible for the comparisons of instances and labels in the same dimension. After that, we project both of them into a new lower dimension space simultaneously, which enables us to extract the structure of dependencies between instances and labels. Finally, we leverage the large margin and $k$NN principle to learn the metric with an efficient optimization algorithm. Moreover, we provide theoretical analysis on the upper bound of the cumulative loss for our method. Comprehensive experiments on a number of benchmark multi-label datasets validate our theoretical approach and illustrate that our proposed online metric learning (OML) algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Federated Learning (FL) is very appealing for its privacy benefits: essentially, a global model is trained with updates computed on mobile devices while keeping the data of users local. Standard FL infrastructures are however designed to have no energy or performance impact on mobile devices, and are therefore not suitable for applications that require frequent (online) model updates, such as news recommenders. This paper presents FLeet, the first Online FL system, acting as a middleware between the Android OS and the machine learning application. FLeet combines the privacy of Standard FL with the precision of online learning thanks to two core components: (i) I-Prof, a new lightweight profiler that predicts and controls the impact of learning tasks on mobile devices, and (ii) AdaSGD, a new adaptive learning algorithm that is resilient to delayed updates. Our extensive evaluation shows that Online FL, as implemented by FLeet, can deliver a 2.3x quality boost compared to Standard FL, while only consuming 0.036% of the battery per day. I-Prof can accurately control the impact of learning tasks by improving the prediction accuracy up to 3.6x (computation time) and up to 19x (energy). AdaSGD outperforms alternative FL approaches by 18.4% in terms of convergence speed on heterogeneous data.

Intrinsically motivated agents freely explore their environment and set their own goals. Such goals are traditionally represented as specific states, but recent works introduced the use of language to facilitate abstraction. Language can, for example, represent goals as sets of general properties that surrounding objects should verify. However, language-conditioned agents are trained simultaneously to understand language and to act, which seems to contrast with how children learn: infants demonstrate goal-oriented behaviors and abstract spatial concepts very early in their development, before language mastery. Guided by these findings from developmental psychology, we introduce a high-level state representation based on natural semantic predicates that describe spatial relations between objects and that are known to be present early in infants. In a robotic manipulation environment, our DECSTR system explores this representation space by manipulating objects, and efficiently learns to achieve any reachable configuration within it. It does so by leveraging an object-centered modular architecture, a symmetry inductive bias, and a new form of automatic curriculum learning for goal selection and policy learning. As with children, language acquisition takes place in a second phase, independently from goal-oriented sensorimotor learning. This is done via a new goal generation module, conditioned on instructions describing expected transformations in object relations. We present ablations studies for each component and highlight several advantages of targeting abstract goals over specific ones. We further show that using this intermediate representation enables efficient language grounding by evaluating agents on sequences of language instructions and their logical combinations.

In the real world, linguistic agents are also embodied agents: they perceive and act in the physical world. The notion of Language Grounding questions the interactions between language and embodiment: how do learning agents connect or ground linguistic representations to the physical world ? This question has recently been approached by the Reinforcement Learning community under the framework of instruction-following agents. In these agents, behavioral policies or reward functions are conditioned on the embedding of an instruction expressed in natural language. This paper proposes another approach: using language to condition goal generators. Given any goal-conditioned policy, one could train a language-conditioned goal generator to generate language-agnostic goals for the agent. This method allows to decouple sensorimotor learning from language acquisition and enable agents to demonstrate a diversity of behaviors for any given instruction. We propose a particular instantiation of this approach and demonstrate its benefits.

Predictive models -- learned from observational data not covering the complete data distribution -- can rely on spurious correlations in the data for making predictions. These correlations make the models brittle and hinder generalization. One solution for achieving strong generalization is to incorporate causal structures in the models; such structures constrain learning by ignoring correlations that contradict them. However, learning these structures is a hard problem in itself. Moreover, it's not clear how to incorporate the machinery of causality with online continual learning. In this work, we take an indirect approach to discovering causal models. Instead of searching for the true causal model directly, we propose an online algorithm that continually detects and removes spurious features. Our algorithm works on the idea that the correlation of a spurious feature with a target is not constant over-time. As a result, the weight associated with that feature is constantly changing. We show that by continually removing such features, our method converges to solutions that have strong generalization. Moreover, our method combined with random search can also discover non-spurious features from raw sensory data. Finally, our work highlights that the information present in the temporal structure of the problem -- destroyed by shuffling the data -- is essential for detecting spurious features online.

Natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) are two fundamental and related tasks in building task-oriented dialogue systems with opposite objectives: NLU tackles the transformation from natural language to formal representations, whereas NLG does the reverse. A key to success in either task is parallel training data which is expensive to obtain at a large scale. In this work, we propose a generative model which couples NLU and NLG through a shared latent variable. This approach allows us to explore both spaces of natural language and formal representations, and facilitates information sharing through the latent space to eventually benefit NLU and NLG. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two dialogue datasets with both flat and tree-structured formal representations. We also show that the model can be trained in a semi-supervised fashion by utilising unlabelled data to boost its performance.

We consider the problem of online learning and its application to solving minimax games. For the online learning problem, Follow the Perturbed Leader (FTPL) is a widely studied algorithm which enjoys the optimal $O(T^{1/2})$ worst-case regret guarantee for both convex and nonconvex losses. In this work, we show that when the sequence of loss functions is predictable, a simple modification of FTPL which incorporates optimism can achieve better regret guarantees, while retaining the optimal worst-case regret guarantee for unpredictable sequences. A key challenge in obtaining these tighter regret bounds is the stochasticity and optimism in the algorithm, which requires different analysis techniques than those commonly used in the analysis of FTPL. The key ingredient we utilize in our analysis is the dual view of perturbation as regularization. While our algorithm has several applications, we consider the specific application of minimax games. For solving smooth convex-concave games, our algorithm only requires access to a linear optimization oracle. For Lipschitz and smooth nonconvex-nonconcave games, our algorithm requires access to an optimization oracle which computes the perturbed best response. In both these settings, our algorithm solves the game up to an accuracy of $O(T^{-1/2})$ using $T$ calls to the optimization oracle. An important feature of our algorithm is that it is highly parallelizable and requires only $O(T^{1/2})$ iterations, with each iteration making $O(T^{1/2})$ parallel calls to the optimization oracle.

We develop an approach for estimating models described via conditional moment restrictions, with a prototypical application being non-parametric instrumental variable regression. We introduce a min-max criterion function, under which the estimation problem can be thought of as solving a zero-sum game between a modeler who is optimizing over the hypothesis space of the target model and an adversary who identifies violating moments over a test function space. We analyze the statistical estimation rate of the resulting estimator for arbitrary hypothesis spaces, with respect to an appropriate analogue of the mean squared error metric, for ill-posed inverse problems. We show that when the minimax criterion is regularized with a second moment penalty on the test function and the test function space is sufficiently rich, then the estimation rate scales with the critical radius of the hypothesis and test function spaces, a quantity which typically gives tight fast rates. Our main result follows from a novel localized Rademacher analysis of statistical learning problems defined via minimax objectives. We provide applications of our main results for several hypothesis spaces used in practice such as: reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, high dimensional sparse linear functions, spaces defined via shape constraints, ensemble estimators such as random forests, and neural networks. For each of these applications we provide computationally efficient optimization methods for solving the corresponding minimax problem (e.g. stochastic first-order heuristics for neural networks). In several applications, we show how our modified mean squared error rate, combined with conditions that bound the ill-posedness of the inverse problem, lead to mean squared error rates. We conclude with an extensive experimental analysis of the proposed methods.

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved great success on a wide variety of sequential decision-making tasks. However, many of these algorithms suffer from high sample complexity when learning from scratch using environmental rewards, due to issues such as credit-assignment and high-variance gradients, among others. Transfer learning, in which knowledge gained on a source task is applied to more efficiently learn a different but related target task, is a promising approach to improve the sample complexity in RL. Prior work has considered using pre-trained teacher policies to enhance the learning of the student policy, albeit with the constraint that the teacher and the student MDPs share the state-space or the action-space. In this paper, we propose a new framework for transfer learning where the teacher and the student can have arbitrarily different state- and action-spaces. To handle this mismatch, we produce embeddings which can systematically extract knowledge from the teacher policy and value networks, and blend it into the student networks. To train the embeddings, we use a task-aligned loss and show that the representations could be enriched further by adding a mutual information loss. Using a set of challenging simulated robotic locomotion tasks involving many-legged centipedes, we demonstrate successful transfer learning in situations when the teacher and student have different state- and action-spaces.