Markov Models
Relational Representation Learning for Dynamic (Knowledge) Graphs: A Survey
Kazemi, Seyed Mehran, Goel, Rishab, Jain, Kshitij, Kobyzev, Ivan, Sethi, Akshay, Forsyth, Peter, Poupart, Pascal
Graphs arise naturally in many real-world applications including social networks, recommender systems, ontologies, biology, and computational finance. Traditionally, machine learning models for graphs have been mostly designed for static graphs. However, many applications involve evolving graphs. This introduces important challenges for learning and inference since nodes, attributes, and edges change over time. In this survey, we review the recent advances in representation learning for dynamic graphs, including dynamic knowledge graphs. We describe existing models from an encoder-decoder perspective, categorize these encoders and decoders based on the techniques they employ, and analyze the approaches in each category. We also review several prominent applications and widely used datasets, and highlight directions for future research.
Tight Regret Bounds for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Greedy Policies
Efroni, Yonathan, Merlis, Nadav, Ghavamzadeh, Mohammad, Mannor, Shie
State-of-the-art efficient model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically act by iteratively solving empirical models, i.e., by performing \emph{full-planning} on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) built by the gathered experience. In this paper, we focus on model-based RL in the finite-state finite-horizon MDP setting and establish that exploring with \emph{greedy policies} -- act by \emph{1-step planning} -- can achieve tight minimax performance in terms of regret, $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{HSAT})$. Thus, full-planning in model-based RL can be avoided altogether without any performance degradation, and, by doing so, the computational complexity decreases by a factor of $S$. The results are based on a novel analysis of real-time dynamic programming, then extended to model-based RL. Specifically, we generalize existing algorithms that perform full-planning to such that act by 1-step planning. For these generalizations, we prove regret bounds with the same rate as their full-planning counterparts.
Modelling conditional probabilities with Riemann-Theta Boltzmann Machines
Carrazza, Stefano, Krefl, Daniel, Papaluca, Andrea
The probability density function for the visible sector of a Riemann-Theta Boltzmann machine can be taken conditional on a subset of the visible units. We derive that the corresponding conditional density function is given by a reparameterization of the Riemann-Theta Boltzmann machine modelling the original probability density function. Therefore the conditional densities can be directly inferred from the Riemann-Theta Boltzmann machine.
Near-optimal Optimistic Reinforcement Learning using Empirical Bernstein Inequalities
Tossou, Aristide, Basu, Debabrota, Dimitrakakis, Christos
We study model-based reinforcement learning in an unknown finite communicating Markov decision process. We propose a simple algorithm that leverages a variance based confidence interval. We show that the proposed algorithm, UCRL-V, achieves the optimal regret $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{DSAT})$ up to logarithmic factors, and so our work closes a gap with the lower bound without additional assumptions on the MDP. We perform experiments in a variety of environments that validates the theoretical bounds as well as prove UCRL-V to be better than the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Strategy Synthesis in POMDPs via Game-Based Abstractions
Winterer, Leonore, Junges, Sebastian, Wimmer, Ralf, Jansen, Nils, Topcu, Ufuk, Katoen, Joost-Pieter, Becker, Bernd
We study synthesis problems with constraints in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), where the objective is to compute a strategy for an agent that is guaranteed to satisfy certain safety and performance specifications. Verification and strategy synthesis for POMDPs are, however, computationally intractable in general. We alleviate this difficulty by focusing on planning applications and exploiting typical structural properties of such scenarios; for instance, we assume that the agent has the ability to observe its own position inside an environment. We propose an abstraction refinement framework which turns such a POMDP model into a (fully observable) probabilistic two-player game (PG). For the obtained PGs, efficient verification and synthesis tools allow to determine strategies with optimal safety and performance measures, which approximate optimal schedulers on the POMDP. If the approximation is too coarse to satisfy the given specifications, an refinement scheme improves the computed strategies. As a running example, we use planning problems where an agent moves inside an environment with randomly moving obstacles and restricted observability. We demonstrate that the proposed method advances the state of the art by solving problems several orders-of-magnitude larger than those that can be handled by existing POMDP solvers. Furthermore, this method gives guarantees on safety constraints, which is not supported by the majority of the existing solvers.
Transcribing Content from Structural Images with Spotlight Mechanism
Yin, Yu, Huang, Zhenya, Chen, Enhong, Liu, Qi, Zhang, Fuzheng, Xie, Xing, Hu, Guoping
Transcribing content from structural images, e.g., writing notes from music scores, is a challenging task as not only the content objects should be recognized, but the internal structure should also be preserved. Existing image recognition methods mainly work on images with simple content (e.g., text lines with characters), but are not capable to identify ones with more complex content (e.g., structured symbols), which often follow a fine-grained grammar. To this end, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical Spotlight Transcribing Network (STN) framework followed by a two-stage "where-to-what" solution. Specifically, we first decide "where-to-look" through a novel spotlight mechanism to focus on different areas of the original image following its structure. Then, we decide "what-to-write" by developing a GRU based network with the spotlight areas for transcribing the content accordingly. Moreover, we propose two implementations on the basis of STN, i.e., STNM and STNR, where the spotlight movement follows the Markov property and Recurrent modeling, respectively. We also design a reinforcement method to refine the framework by self-improving the spotlight mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments on many structural image datasets, where the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of STN framework.
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?