Markov Models
Transferable Multi-Domain State Generator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Wu, Chien-Sheng, Madotto, Andrea, Hosseini-Asl, Ehsan, Xiong, Caiming, Socher, Richard, Fung, Pascale
Over-dependence on domain ontology and lack of knowledge sharing across domains are two practical and yet less studied problems of dialogue state tracking. Existing approaches generally fall short in tracking unknown slot values during inference and often have difficulties in adapting to new domains. In this paper, we propose a Transferable Dialogue State Generator (TRADE) that generates dialogue states from utterances using a copy mechanism, facilitating knowledge transfer when predicting (domain, slot, value) triplets not encountered during training. Our model is composed of an utterance encoder, a slot gate, and a state generator, which are shared across domains. Empirical results demonstrate that TRADE achieves state-of-the-art joint goal accuracy of 48.62% for the five domains of MultiWOZ, a human-human dialogue dataset. In addition, we show its transferring ability by simulating zero-shot and few-shot dialogue state tracking for unseen domains. TRADE achieves 60.58% joint goal accuracy in one of the zero-shot domains, and is able to adapt to few-shot cases without forgetting already trained domains.
Reachable Space Characterization of Markov Decision Processes with Time Variability
Xu, Junhong, Yin, Kai, Liu, Lantao
We propose a solution to a time-varying variant of Markov Decision Processes which can be used to address decision-theoretic planning problems for autonomous systems operating in unstructured outdoor environments. We explore the time variability property of the planning stochasticity and investigate the state reachability, based on which we then develop an efficient iterative method that offers a good trade-off between solution optimality and time complexity. The reachability space is constructed by analyzing the means and variances of states' reaching time in the future. We validate our algorithm through extensive simulations using ocean data, and the results show that our method achieves a great performance in terms of both solution quality and computing time.
Large Scale Markov Decision Processes with Changing Rewards
Cardoso, Adrian Rivera, Wang, He, Xu, Huan
We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the rewards are unknown and may change in an adversarial manner. We provide an algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art regret bound of $O( \sqrt{\tau (\ln|S|+\ln|A|)T}\ln(T))$, where $S$ is the state space, $A$ is the action space, $\tau$ is the mixing time of the MDP, and $T$ is the number of periods. The algorithm's computational complexity is polynomial in $|S|$ and $|A|$ per period. We then consider a setting often encountered in practice, where the state space of the MDP is too large to allow for exact solutions. By approximating the state-action occupancy measures with a linear architecture of dimension $d\ll|S|$, we propose a modified algorithm with computational complexity polynomial in $d$. We also prove a regret bound for this modified algorithm, which to the best of our knowledge this is the first $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound for large scale MDPs with changing rewards.
Online Learning Made Simple - Anytime, Anywhere Simpliv
Artificial Intelligence has come a long way from being the stuff of science fiction movies and books to becoming an integral part of our daily lives. Today, AI is one of the fastest growing global industries. Investments and experiments in AI have been taking place all around the world. Given its unimaginably wide range of uses; AI is a field of expertise that is set to grow in a very huge way over the coming years. AI professionals are among the highest paid in the field of IT. Ans: Artificial Intelligence is a part of computer science that aims to create machine that are intelligent and seek to work and react the way humans do. Q2)What to you understand by an artificial intelligence Neural Network?
Neural Stochastic Differential Equations: Deep Latent Gaussian Models in the Diffusion Limit
Tzen, Belinda, Raginsky, Maxim
In deep latent Gaussian models, the latent variable is generated by a time-inhomogeneous Markov chain, where at each time step we pass the current state through a parametric nonlinear map, such as a feedforward neural net, and add a small independent Gaussian perturbation. This work considers the diffusion limit of such models, where the number of layers tends to infinity, while the step size and the noise variance tend to zero. The limiting latent object is an It\^o diffusion process that solves a stochastic differential equation (SDE) whose drift and diffusion coefficient are implemented by neural nets. We develop a variational inference framework for these \textit{neural SDEs} via stochastic backpropagation in Wiener space, where the variational approximations to the posterior are obtained by Girsanov (mean-shift) transformation of the standard Wiener process and the computation of gradients is based on the theory of stochastic flows. This permits the use of black-box SDE solvers and automatic differentiation for end-to-end inference. Experimental results with synthetic data are provided.
Where to Find Next Passengers on E-hailing Platforms? - A Markov Decision Process Approach
Shou, Zhenyu, Di, Xuan, Ye, Jieping, Zhu, Hongtu, Hampshire, Robert
Vacant taxi drivers' passenger seeking process in a road network generates additional vehicle miles traveled, adding congestion and pollution into the road network and the environment. This paper aims to employ a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to model idle e-hailing drivers' optimal sequential decisions in passenger-seeking. Transportation network companies (TNC) or e-hailing (e.g., Didi, Uber) drivers exhibit different behaviors from traditional taxi drivers because e-hailing drivers do not need to actually search for passengers. Instead, they reposition themselves so that the matching platform can match a passenger. Accordingly, we incorporate e-hailing drivers' new features into our MDP model. We then use 44,160 Didi drivers' 3-day trajectories to train the model. To validate the effectiveness of the model, a Monte Carlo simulation is conducted to simulate the performance of drivers under the guidance of the optimal policy, which is then compared with the performance of drivers following one baseline heuristic, namely, the local hotspot strategy. The results show that our model is able to achieve a 26% improvement over the local hotspot strategy in terms of the rate of return. The proposed MDP model captures the supply-demand ratio considering the fact that the number of drivers in this study is sufficiently large and thus the number of unmatched orders is assumed to be negligible. To better incorporate the competition among multiple drivers into the model, we have also devised and calibrated a dynamic adjustment strategy of the order matching probability.
Average reward reinforcement learning with unknown mixing times
Zahavy, Tom, Cohen, Alon, Kaplan, Haim, Mansour, Yishay
We derive and analyze learning algorithms for policy evaluation, apprenticeship learning, and policy gradient for average reward criteria. Existing algorithms explicitly require an upper bound on the mixing time. In contrast, we build on ideas from Markov chain theory and derive sampling algorithms that do not require such an upper bound. For these algorithms, we provide theoretical bounds on their sample-complexity and running time.
Top 5 Skills Needed to Become a Machine Learning Engineer Analytics Insight
We are living in the realm of people and machines. People have been developing and gaining from their past experience for many years. Then again, the period of machines and robots have quite recently started. The eventual fate of machine is tremendous and is past our extent of creative ability. We leave this extraordinary responsibility on the shoulder of a specific individual to be precise, Machine Learning Engineer.
Deep Signatures
Bonnier, Patric, Kidger, Patrick, Arribas, Imanol Perez, Salvi, Cristopher, Lyons, Terry
The signature is an infinite graded sequence of statistics known to characterise a stream of data up to a negligible equivalence class. It is a transform which has previously been treated as a fixed feature transformation, on top of which a model may be built. We propose a novel approach which combines the advantages of the signature transform with modern deep learning frameworks. By learning an augmentation of the stream prior to the signature transform, the terms of the signature may be selected in a data-dependent way. More generally, we describe how the signature transform may be used as a layer anywhere within a neural network. In this context it may be interpreted as an activation function not operating element-wise. We present the results of empirical experiments to back up the theoretical justification.
Probability and Statistics explained in the context of deep learning
This article is intended for beginners in deep learning who wish to gain knowledge about probability and statistics and also as a reference for practitioners. In my previous article, I wrote about the concepts of linear algebra for deep learning in a top down approach ( link for the article) (If you do not have enough idea about linear algebra, please read that first).The same top down approach is used here.Providing the description of use cases first and then the concepts. All the example code uses python and numpy.Formulas are provided as images for reuse. Probability is the science of quantifying uncertain things.Most of machine learning and deep learning systems utilize a lot of data to learn about patterns in the data.Whenever data is utilized in a system rather than sole logic, uncertainty grows up and whenever uncertainty grows up, probability becomes relevant. By introducing probability to a deep learning system, we introduce common sense to the system.Otherwise the system would be very brittle and will not be useful.In deep learning, several models like bayesian models, probabilistic graphical models, hidden markov models are used.They depend entirely on probability concepts.