Domain adaptation performance of a learning algorithm on a target domain is a function of its source domain error and a divergence measure between the data distribution of these two domains. We present a study of various distance-based measures in the context of NLP tasks, that characterize the dissimilarity between domains based on sample estimates. We first conduct analysis experiments to show which of these distance measures can best differentiate samples from same versus different domains, and are correlated with empirical results. Next, we develop a DistanceNet model which uses these distance measures, or a mixture of these distance measures, as an additional loss function to be minimized jointly with the task's loss function, so as to achieve better unsupervised domain adaptation. Finally, we extend this model to a novel DistanceNet-Bandit model, which employs a multi-armed bandit controller to dynamically switch between multiple source domains and allow the model to learn an optimal trajectory and mixture of domains for transfer to the low-resource target domain. We conduct experiments on popular sentiment analysis datasets with several diverse domains and show that our DistanceNet model, as well as its dynamic bandit variant, can outperform competitive baselines in the context of unsupervised domain adaptation. 1 Introduction In situations where large-scale annotated datasets are available, supervised learning algorithms have achieved remarkable progress in various NLP challenges (LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton 2015). Most supervised learning algorithms rely on the assumption that data distribution during training is the same as that during test. However, in many real-life scenarios, the data distribution of interest at test-time might be different from that during training. The process of collecting new datasets that reflect the new distribution is usually not scalable due to monetary as well as time constraints.

Ensemble learning is a very prevalent method employed in machine learning. The relative success of ensemble methods is attributed to its ability to tackle a wide range of instances and complex problems that require different low-level approaches. However, ensemble methods are relatively less popular in reinforcement learning owing to the high sample complexity and computational expense involved. We present a new training and evaluation framework for model-free algorithms that use ensembles of policies obtained from a single training instance. These policies are diverse in nature and are learned through directed perturbation of the model parameters at regular intervals.

Supervised learning solves modern analytics challenges and drives informed organizational decisions. Although the predictive power of machine learning models can be very impressive, there is no benefit unless they drive actions. Models must be deployed in an automated fashion to continually support decision making for measurable benefit. And while unsupervised methods open powerful analytic opportunities, they do not come with a clear path to deployment. This course will clarify when each approach best fits the business need and show you how to derive value from both approaches.

Semi-supervised learning aims to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data to improve the accuracy of a model that only has access to a small number of labeled examples. We propose curriculum labeling, an approach that exploits pseudo-labeling for propagating labels to unlabeled samples in an iterative and self-paced fashion. This approach is surprisingly simple and effective and surpasses or is comparable with the best methods proposed in the recent literature across all the standard benchmarks for image classification. Notably, we obtain 94.91% accuracy on CIFAR-10 using only 4,000 labeled samples, and 88.56% top-5 accuracy on Imagenet-ILSVRC using 128,000 labeled samples. In contrast to prior works, our approach shows improvements even in a more realistic scenario that leverages out-of-distribution unlabeled data samples.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made astonishing progress in the last decade. AI can now drive cars, diagnose diseases from medical images, recommend movies, even whom you should date, make investment decisions, and create art that people have sold at auction. A lot of research today, however, focuses on teaching AI to do things the way we do them. For example, computer vision and natural language processing – two of the hottest research areas in the field – deal with building AI models that can see like humans and use language like humans. But instead of teaching computers to imitate human thought, the time has now come to let them evolve on their own, so instead of becoming like us, they have a chance to become better than us.

Structured prediction requires manipulating a large number of combinatorial structures, e.g., dependency trees or alignments, either as latent or output variables. Recently, the SparseMAP method has been proposed as a differentiable, sparse alternative to maximum a posteriori (MAP) and marginal inference. SparseMAP returns a combination of a small number of structures, a desirable property in some downstream applications. However, SparseMAP requires a tractable MAP inference oracle. This excludes, e.g., loopy graphical models or factor graphs with logic constraints, which generally require approximate inference. In this paper, we introduce LP-SparseMAP, an extension of SparseMAP that addresses this limitation via a local polytope relaxation. LP-SparseMAP uses the flexible and powerful domain specific language of factor graphs for defining and backpropagating through arbitrary hidden structure, supporting coarse decompositions, hard logic constraints, and higher-order correlations. We derive the forward and backward algorithms needed for using LP-SparseMAP as a hidden or output layer. Experiments in three structured prediction tasks show benefits compared to SparseMAP and Structured SVM.

Compared to supervised learning, semi-supervised learning reduces the dependence of deep learning on a large number of labeled samples. In this work, we use a small number of labeled samples and perform data augmentation on unlabeled samples to achieve image classification. Our method constrains all samples to the predefined evenly-distributed class centroids (PEDCC) by the corresponding loss function. Specifically, the PEDCC-Loss for labeled samples, and the maximum mean discrepancy loss for unlabeled samples are used to make the feature distribution closer to the distribution of PEDCC. Our method ensures that the inter-class distance is large and the intra-class distance is small enough to make the classification boundaries between different classes clearer. Meanwhile, for unlabeled samples, we also use KL divergence to constrain the consistency of the network predictions between unlabeled and augmented samples. Our semi-supervised learning method achieves the state-of-the-art results, with 4000 labeled samples on CIFAR10 and 1000 labeled samples on SVHN, and the accuracy is 95.10% and 97.58% respectively.

Many proposed methods for explaining machine learning predictions are in fact challenging to understand for nontechnical consumers. This paper builds upon an alternative consumer-driven approach called TED that asks for explanations to be provided in training data, along with target labels. Using semi-synthetic data from credit approval and employee retention applications, experiments are conducted to investigate some practical considerations with TED, including its performance with different classification algorithms, varying numbers of explanations, and variability in explanations. A new algorithm is proposed to handle the case where some training examples do not have explanations. Our results show that TED is robust to increasing numbers of explanations, noisy explanations, and large fractions of missing explanations, thus making advances toward its practical deployment.

Relation Extraction (RE), the task of detecting and characterizing semantic relations between entities in text, has gained much importance in the last two decades, mainly in the biomedical domain. Many papers have been published on Relation Extraction using supervised machine learning techniques. Most of these techniques rely on statistical methods, such as feature-based and tree-kernels-based methods. Such statistical learning techniques are usually based on a propositional hypothesis space for representing examples, i.e., they employ an attribute-value representation of features. This kind of representation has some drawbacks, particularly in the extraction of complex relations which demand more contextual information about the involving instances, i.e., it is not able to effectively capture structural information from parse trees without loss of information. In this work, we present OntoILPER, a logic-based relational learning approach to Relation Extraction that uses Inductive Logic Programming for generating extraction models in the form of symbolic extraction rules. OntoILPER takes profit of a rich relational representation of examples, which can alleviate the aforementioned drawbacks. The proposed relational approach seems to be more suitable for Relation Extraction than statistical ones for several reasons that we argue. Moreover, OntoILPER uses a domain ontology that guides the background knowledge generation process and is used for storing the extracted relation instances. The induced extraction rules were evaluated on three protein-protein interaction datasets from the biomedical domain. The performance of OntoILPER extraction models was compared with other state-of-the-art RE systems. The encouraging results seem to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

We present a simple, flexible, and general framework titled Partial Registration Network (PRNet), for partial-to-partial point cloud registration. Inspired by recently-proposed learning-based methods for registration, we use deep networks to tackle non-convexity of the alignment and partial correspondence problem. While previous learning-based methods assume the entire shape is visible, PRNet is suitable for partial-to-partial registration, outperforming PointNetLK, DCP, and non-learning methods on synthetic data. PRNet is self-supervised, jointly learning an appropriate geometric representation, a keypoint detector that finds points in common between partial views, and keypoint-to-keypoint correspondences. We show PRNet predicts keypoints and correspondences consistently across views and objects.