Education
Reports on the 2014 AAAI Fall Symposium Series
Cohen, Adam B. (Independent Consultant) | Chernova, Sonia (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) | Giordano, James (Georgetown University Medical Center) | Guerin, Frank (University of Aberdeen) | Hauser, Kris (Duke University) | Indurkhya, Bipin (AGH University of Science and Technology) | Leonetti, Matteo (University of Texas at Austin) | Medsker, Larry (Siena College) | Michalowski, Martin (Adventium Labs) | Sonntag, Daniel (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) | Stojanov, Georgi (American University of Paris) | Tecuci, Dan G. (IBM Watson, Austin) | Thomaz, Andrea (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Veale, Tony (University College Dublin) | Waltinger, Ulli (Siemens Corporate Technology)
The program also included six keynote presentations, a funding panel, a community panel, and multiple breakout sessions. The keynote presentations, given by speakers that have been working on AI for HRI for many years, focused on the larger intellectual picture of this subfield. Each speaker was asked to address, from his or her personal perspective, why HRI is an AI problem and how AI research can bring us closer to the reality of humans interacting with robots on everyday tasks. Speakers included Rodney Brooks (Rethink Robotics), Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University), Michael Goodrich (Brigham Young University), Benjamin Kuipers (University of Michigan), Maja Mataric (University of Southern California), and Brian Scassellati (Yale University).
A Summary of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Morris, Robert (NASA) | Bonet, Blai (Universidad Simรณn Bolรญvar) | Cavazza, Marc (Teesside University) | desJardins, Marie (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) | Felner, Ariel (BenGurion University) | Hawes, Nick (University of Birmingham) | Knox, Brad (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Koenig, Sven (University of Southern California) | Konidaris, George (Massachusetts Institute of Technology,) | Lang, Jรฉrรดme ((Universitรฉ ParisDauphine) | Lรณpez, Carlos Linares (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) | Magazzeni, Daniele (King's College London) | McGovern, Amy (University of Oklahoma) | Natarajan, Sriraam (Indiana University) | Sturtevant, Nathan R. (University of Denver,) | Thielscher, Michael (University New South Wales) | Yeoh, William (New Mexico State University) | Sardina, Sebastian (RMIT University) | Wagstaff, Kiri (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
The AAAI-15 organizing committee of about 60 researchers arranged many of the traditional AAAI events, including the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) Conference, tutorials, workshops, the video competition, senior member summary talks (on well-developed bodies of research or important new research areas), and What's Hot talks (on research trends observed in other AIrelated conferences and, for the first time, competitions). Innovations of AAAI-15 included software and hardware demonstration programs, a virtual agent exhibition, a computer-game showcase, a funding information session with program directors from different funding agencies, and Blue Sky Idea talks (on visions intended to stimulate new directions in AI research) with awards funded by the CRA Computing Community Consortium. Seven invited talks surveyed AI research in academia and industry and its impact on society. Attendees kept track of the program through a smartphone app as well as social media channels.
CiteSeerX: AI in a Digital Library Search Engine
Wu, Jian (Pennsylvania State University) | Williams, Kyle Mark (Pennsylvania State University) | Chen, Hung-Hsuan (Industrial Technology Research Institute) | Khabsa, Madian (Pennsylvania State University) | Caragea, Cornelia (University of North Texas) | Tuarob, Suppawong (Pennsylvania State University) | Ororbia, Alexander G. (Pennsylvania State University) | Jordan, Douglas (Pennsylvania State University) | Mitra, Prasenjit (Pennsylvania State University) | Giles, C. Lee (Pennsylvania State University)
Since then, the project has been directed by C. Lee Giles. While it is challenging to rebuild a system like Cite-SeerX from scratch, many of these AI technologies are transferable to other digital libraries and search engines. This is different from arXiv, Harvard ADS, and machine cluster to a private cloud using virtualization PubMed, where papers are submitted by authors or techniques (Wu et al. 2014). CiteSeerX extensively pushed by publishers. Unlike Google Scholar and leverages open source software, which significantly Microsoft Academic Search, where a significant portion reduces development effort. Red Hat of documents have only metadata (such as titles, Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 are the operating authors, and abstracts) available, users have full-text systems for all servers. Tomcat 7 is CiteSeerX keeps its own repository, which used for web service deployment on web and indexing serves cached versions of papers even if their previous servers. MySQL is used as the database management links are not alive any more. In additional to system to store metadata. Apache Solr is used paper downloads, CiteSeerX provides automatically for the index, and the Spring framework is used in extracted metadata and citation context, which the web application. In this section, we highlight four AI solutions that are Document metadata download service is not available leveraged by CiteSeerX and that tackle different challenges from Google Scholar and only recently available in metadata extraction and ingestion modules from Microsoft Academic Search. Finally, CiteSeerX (tagged by C, E, D, and A in figure 1).
A Review of Relational Machine Learning for Knowledge Graphs
Nickel, Maximilian, Murphy, Kevin, Tresp, Volker, Gabrilovich, Evgeniy
In this paper, we provide a review of how such statistical models can be "trained" on large knowledge graphs, and then used to predict new facts about the world (which is equivalent to predicting new edges in the graph). In particular, we discuss two fundamentally different kinds of statistical relational models, both of which can scale to massive datasets. The first is based on latent feature models such as tensor factorization and multiway neural networks. The second is based on mining observable patterns in the graph. We also show how to combine these latent and observable models to get improved modeling power at decreased computational cost. Finally, we discuss how such statistical models of graphs can be combined with text-based information extraction methods for automatically constructing knowledge graphs from the Web. To this end, we also discuss Google's Knowledge Vault project as an example of such combination.
Zero-Shot Learning via Semantic Similarity Embedding
Zhang, Ziming, Saligrama, Venkatesh
In this paper we consider a version of the zero-shot learning problem where seen class source and target domain data are provided. The goal during test-time is to accurately predict the class label of an unseen target domain instance based on revealed source domain side information (\eg attributes) for unseen classes. Our method is based on viewing each source or target data as a mixture of seen class proportions and we postulate that the mixture patterns have to be similar if the two instances belong to the same unseen class. This perspective leads us to learning source/target embedding functions that map an arbitrary source/target domain data into a same semantic space where similarity can be readily measured. We develop a max-margin framework to learn these similarity functions and jointly optimize parameters by means of cross validation. Our test results are compelling, leading to significant improvement in terms of accuracy on most benchmark datasets for zero-shot recognition.
Bayesian Conditional Density Filtering
Qamar, Shaan, Guhaniyogi, Rajarshi, Dunson, David B.
We propose a Conditional Density Filtering (C-DF) algorithm for efficient online Bayesian inference. C-DF adapts MCMC sampling to the online setting, sampling from approximations to conditional posterior distributions obtained by propagating surrogate conditional sufficient statistics (a function of data and parameter estimates) as new data arrive. These quantities eliminate the need to store or process the entire dataset simultaneously and offer a number of desirable features. Often, these include a reduction in memory requirements and runtime and improved mixing, along with state-of-the-art parameter inference and prediction. These improvements are demonstrated through several illustrative examples including an application to high dimensional compressed regression. Finally, we show that C-DF samples converge to the target posterior distribution asymptotically as sampling proceeds and more data arrives.
Classification error in multiclass discrimination from Markov data
Christensen, Sรถren, Irle, Albrecht, Willert, Lars
As a model for an on-line classification setting we consider a stochastic process $(X_{-n},Y_{-n})_{n}$, the present time-point being denoted by 0, with observables $ \ldots,X_{-n},X_{-n+1},\ldots, X_{-1}, X_0$ from which the pattern $Y_0$ is to be inferred. So in this classification setting, in addition to the present observation $X_0$ a number $l$ of preceding observations may be used for classification, thus taking a possible dependence structure into account as it occurs e.g. in an ongoing classification of handwritten characters. We treat the question how the performance of classifiers is improved by using such additional information. For our analysis, a hidden Markov model is used. Letting $R_l$ denote the minimal risk of misclassification using $l$ preceding observations we show that the difference $\sup_k |R_l - R_{l+k}|$ decreases exponentially fast as $l$ increases. This suggests that a small $l$ might already lead to a noticeable improvement. To follow this point we look at the use of past observations for kernel classification rules. Our practical findings in simulated hidden Markov models and in the classification of handwritten characters indicate that using $l=1$, i.e. just the last preceding observation in addition to $X_0$, can lead to a substantial reduction of the risk of misclassification. So, in the presence of stochastic dependencies, we advocate to use $ X_{-1},X_0$ for finding the pattern $Y_0$ instead of only $X_0$ as one would in the independent situation.
The Online Coupon-Collector Problem and Its Application to Lifelong Reinforcement Learning
Transferring knowledge across a sequence of related tasks is an important challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite much encouraging empirical evidence, there has been little theoretical analysis. In this paper, we study a class of lifelong RL problems: the agent solves a sequence of tasks modeled as finite Markov decision processes (MDPs), each of which is from a finite set of MDPs with the same state/action sets and different transition/reward functions. Motivated by the need for cross-task exploration in lifelong learning, we formulate a novel online coupon-collector problem and give an optimal algorithm. This allows us to develop a new lifelong RL algorithm, whose overall sample complexity in a sequence of tasks is much smaller than single-task learning, even if the sequence of tasks is generated by an adversary. Benefits of the algorithm are demonstrated in simulated problems, including a recently introduced human-robot interaction problem.
Benchmarking for Bayesian Reinforcement Learning
Castronovo, Michael, Ernst, Damien, Couetoux, Adrien, Fonteneau, Raphael
In the Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (BRL) setting, agents try to maximise the collected rewards while interacting with their environment while using some prior knowledge that is accessed beforehand. Many BRL algorithms have already been proposed, but even though a few toy examples exist in the literature, there are still no extensive or rigorous benchmarks to compare them. The paper addresses this problem, and provides a new BRL comparison methodology along with the corresponding open source library. In this methodology, a comparison criterion that measures the performance of algorithms on large sets of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) drawn from some probability distributions is defined. In order to enable the comparison of non-anytime algorithms, our methodology also includes a detailed analysis of the computation time requirement of each algorithm. Our library is released with all source code and documentation: it includes three test problems, each of which has two different prior distributions, and seven state-of-the-art RL algorithms. Finally, our library is illustrated by comparing all the available algorithms and the results are discussed.
Scalable Kernel Methods via Doubly Stochastic Gradients
Dai, Bo, Xie, Bo, He, Niao, Liang, Yingyu, Raj, Anant, Balcan, Maria-Florina, Song, Le
The general perception is that kernel methods are not scalable, and neural nets are the methods of choice for nonlinear learning problems. Or have we simply not tried hard enough for kernel methods? Here we propose an approach that scales up kernel methods using a novel concept called "doubly stochastic functional gradients". Our approach relies on the fact that many kernel methods can be expressed as convex optimization problems, and we solve the problems by making two unbiased stochastic approximations to the functional gradient, one using random training points and another using random functions associated with the kernel, and then descending using this noisy functional gradient. We show that a function produced by this procedure after $t$ iterations converges to the optimal function in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space in rate $O(1/t)$, and achieves a generalization performance of $O(1/\sqrt{t})$. This doubly stochasticity also allows us to avoid keeping the support vectors and to implement the algorithm in a small memory footprint, which is linear in number of iterations and independent of data dimension. Our approach can readily scale kernel methods up to the regimes which are dominated by neural nets. We show that our method can achieve competitive performance to neural nets in datasets such as 8 million handwritten digits from MNIST, 2.3 million energy materials from MolecularSpace, and 1 million photos from ImageNet.