Much like most of cognition research, music cognition is an interdisciplinary field, which attempts to apply methods of cognitive science (neurological, computational and experimental) to understand the perception and process of composition of music. In this paper, we first motivate why music is relevant to cognitive scientists and give an overview of the approaches to computational modelling of music cognition. We then review literature on the various models of music perception, including non-computational models, computational non-cognitive models and computational cognitive models. Lastly, we review literature on modelling the creative behaviour and on computer systems capable of composing music. Since a lot of technical terms from music theory have been used, we have appended a list of relevant terms and their definitions at the end.

The principle of maximum entropy is a broadly applicable technique for computing a distribution with the least amount of information possible while constrained to match empirically estimated feature expectations. However, in many real-world applications that use noisy sensors computing the feature expectations may be challenging due to partial observation of the relevant model variables. For example, a robot performing apprenticeship learning may lose sight of the agent it is learning from due to environmental occlusion. We show that in generalizing the principle of maximum entropy to these types of scenarios we unavoidably introduce a dependency on the learned model to the empirical feature expectations. We introduce the principle of uncertain maximum entropy and present an expectation-maximization based solution generalized from the principle of latent maximum entropy. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the improved robustness to noisy data offered by our technique in a maximum causal entropy inverse reinforcement learning domain.

We propose ordering-based approaches for learning the maximal ancestral graph (MAG) of a structural equation model (SEM) up to its Markov equivalence class (MEC) in the presence of unobserved variables. Existing ordering-based methods in the literature recover a graph through learning a causal order (c-order). We advocate for a novel order called removable order (r-order) as they are advantageous over c-orders for structure learning. This is because r-orders are the minimizers of an appropriately defined optimization problem that could be either solved exactly (using a reinforcement learning approach) or approximately (using a hill-climbing search). Moreover, the r-orders (unlike c-orders) are invariant among all the graphs in a MEC and include c-orders as a subset. Given that set of r-orders is often significantly larger than the set of c-orders, it is easier for the optimization problem to find an r-order instead of a c-order. We evaluate the performance and the scalability of our proposed approaches on both real-world and randomly generated networks.

In this paper we study online Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable dynamical systems. We focus on the Predictive State Representations (PSRs) model, which is an expressive model that captures other well-known models such as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP). PSR represents the states using a set of predictions of future observations and is defined entirely using observable quantities. We develop a novel model-based algorithm for PSRs that can learn a near optimal policy in sample complexity scaling polynomially with respect to all the relevant parameters of the systems. Our algorithm naturally works with function approximation to extend to systems with potentially large state and observation spaces. We show that given a realizable model class, the sample complexity of learning the near optimal policy only scales polynomially with respect to the statistical complexity of the model class, without any explicit polynomial dependence on the size of the state and observation spaces. Notably, our work is the first work that shows polynomial sample complexities to compete with the globally optimal policy in PSRs. Finally, we demonstrate how our general theorem can be directly used to derive sample complexity bounds for special models including $m$-step weakly revealing and $m$-step decodable tabular POMDPs, POMDPs with low-rank latent transition, and POMDPs with linear emission and latent transition.

The safety-critical scenarios of artificial intelligence (AI), such as autonomous driving, Internet of Things, smart healthcare, etc., have raised critical requirements of trustworthy AI to guarantee the privacy and security with reliable decisions. As a nascent branch for trustworthy AI, federated learning (FL) has been regarded as a promising privacy preserving framework for training a global AI model over collaborative devices. However, security challenges still exist in the FL framework, e.g., Byzantine attacks from malicious devices, and model tampering attacks from malicious server, which will degrade or destroy the accuracy of trained global AI model. In this paper, we shall propose a decentralized blockchain based FL (B-FL) architecture by using a secure global aggregation algorithm to resist malicious devices, and deploying practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus protocol with high effectiveness and low energy consumption among multiple edge servers to prevent model tampering from the malicious server. However, to implement B-FL system at the network edge, multiple rounds of cross-validation in blockchain consensus protocol will induce long training latency. We thus formulate a network optimization problem that jointly considers bandwidth and power allocation for the minimization of long-term average training latency consisting of progressive learning rounds. We further propose to transform the network optimization problem as a Markov decision process and leverage the deep reinforcement learning based algorithm to provide high system performance with low computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that B-FL can resist malicious attacks from edge devices and servers, and the training latency of B-FL can be significantly reduced by deep reinforcement learning based algorithm compared with baseline algorithms.

The transferability of adversarial examples (AEs) across diverse models is of critical importance for black-box adversarial attacks, where attackers cannot access the information about black-box models. However, crafted AEs always present poor transferability. In this paper, by regarding the transferability of AEs as generalization ability of the model, we reveal that vanilla black-box attacks craft AEs via solving a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) problem. For MLE, the results probably are model-specific local optimum when available data is small, i.e., limiting the transferability of AEs. By contrast, we re-formulate crafting transferable AEs as the maximizing a posteriori probability estimation problem, which is an effective approach to boost the generalization of results with limited available data. Because Bayes posterior inference is commonly intractable, a simple yet effective method called MaskBlock is developed to approximately estimate. Moreover, we show that the formulated framework is a generalization version for various attack methods. Extensive experiments illustrate MaskBlock can significantly improve the transferability of crafted adversarial examples by up to about 20%.

Attention-based deep learning models, such as Transformers (Vaswani et al., 2017; Devlin et al., 2019), have achieved unprecedented empirical success in a wide range of cognitive tasks, in particular in natural language processing (NLP). On the other hand, deep variational Bayesian approaches to representation learning, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) (Kingma and Welling, 2014), have also been very influential, especially due to their variational information bottleneck (VIB) (Alemi et al., 2017; Kingma and Welling, 2014) for regularising the induced latent representations. Previous VIB methods only apply to a vector space, and Transformers crucially do not use a single vector as their latent representation, instead using a set of vectors (Lin et al., 2020; Fang et al., 2021; Park and Lee, 2021). This allows the number of vectors in a Transformer embedding to grow with the size of the input, which is essential for embedding natural language text (Bahdanau et al., 2015), where the size of the input can range from a single word to thousands of words. In this paper, we propose a variational information bottleneck regulariser for set-of-vector latent representations, and use it to regularise the induced latent representation of a Transformer encoder-decoder variational autoencoder.

We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of samples required to identify an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. The lower bound characterizes the optimal sampling rule as the solution of an intricate non-convex optimization program, but can be used as the starting point to devise simple and near-optimal sampling rules and algorithms. We devise such algorithms. One of these exhibits a sample complexity upper bounded by ${\cal O}({\frac{d}{(\varepsilon+\Delta)^2}} (\log(\frac{1}{\delta})+d))$ where $\Delta$ denotes the minimum reward gap of sub-optimal actions and $d$ is the dimension of the feature space. This upper bound holds in the moderate-confidence regime (i.e., for all $\delta$), and matches existing minimax and gap-dependent lower bounds. We extend our algorithm to episodic linear MDPs.

The problem of maximum likelihood decoding with a neural decoder for error-correcting code is considered. It is shown that the neural decoder can be improved with two novel loss terms on the node's activations. The first loss term imposes a sparse constraint on the node's activations. Whereas, the second loss term tried to mimic the node's activations from a teacher decoder which has better performance. The proposed method has the same run time complexity and model size as the neural Belief Propagation decoder, while improving the decoding performance by up to $1.1dB$ on BCH codes.

The space of value functions is a fundamental concept in reinforcement learning. Characterizing its geometric properties may provide insights for optimization and representation. Existing works mainly focus on the value space for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we study the geometry of the robust value space for the more general Robust MDPs (RMDPs) setting, where transition uncertainties are considered. Specifically, since we find it hard to directly adapt prior approaches to RMDPs, we start with revisiting the non-robust case, and introduce a new perspective that enables us to characterize both the non-robust and robust value space in a similar fashion. The key of this perspective is to decompose the value space, in a state-wise manner, into unions of hypersurfaces. Through our analysis, we show that the robust value space is determined by a set of conic hypersurfaces, each of which contains the robust values of all policies that agree on one state. Furthermore, we find that taking only extreme points in the uncertainty set is sufficient to determine the robust value space. Finally, we discuss some other aspects about the robust value space, including its non-convexity and policy agreement on multiple states.