DNA-based nanonetworks have a wide range of promising use cases, especially in the field of medicine. With a large set of agents, a partially observable stochastic environment, and noisy observations, such nanoscale systems can be modelled as a decentralised, partially observable, Markov decision process (DecPOMDP). As the agent set is a dominating factor, this paper presents (i) lifted DecPOMDPs, partitioning the agent set into sets of indistinguishable agents, reducing the worst-case space required, and (ii) a nanoscale medical system as an application. Future work turns to solving and implementing lifted DecPOMDPs.

In the age of digital interaction, person-to-person relationships existing on social media may be different from the very same interactions that exist offline. Examining potential or spurious relationships between members in a social network is a fertile area of research for computer scientists -- here we examine how relationships can be predicted between two unconnected people in a social network by using area under Precison-Recall curve and ROC. Modeling the social network as a signed graph, we compare Triadic model,Latent Information model and Sentiment model and use them to predict peer to peer interactions, first using a plain signed network, and second using a signed network with comments as context. We see that our models are much better than random model and could complement each other in different cases.

There is a growing interest in integrating machine learning techniques and optimization to solve challenging optimization problems. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning methodology for the job shop scheduling problem (JSSP). The aim is to build up a greedy-like heuristic able to learn on some distribution of JSSP instances, different in the number of jobs and machines. The need for fast scheduling methods is well known, and it arises in many areas, from transportation to healthcare. We model the JSSP as a Markov Decision Process and then we exploit the efficacy of reinforcement learning to solve the problem. We adopt an actor-critic scheme, where the action taken by the agent is influenced by policy considerations on the state-value function. The procedures are adapted to take into account the challenging nature of JSSP, where the state and the action space change not only for every instance but also after each decision. To tackle the variability in the number of jobs and operations in the input, we modeled the agent using two incident LSTM models, a special type of deep neural network. Experiments show the algorithm reaches good solutions in a short time, proving that is possible to generate new greedy heuristics just from learning-based methodologies. Benchmarks have been generated in comparison with the commercial solver CPLEX. As expected, the model can generalize, to some extent, to larger problems or instances originated by a different distribution from the one used in training.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is an effective approach to optimize expensive black-box functions, that seeks to trade-off between exploitation (selecting parameters where the maximum is likely) and exploration (selecting parameters where we are uncertain about the objective function). In many real-world situations, direct measurements of the objective function are not possible, and only binary measurements such as success/failure or pairwise comparisons are available. To perform efficient exploration in this setting, we show that it is important for BO algorithms to distinguish between different types of uncertainty: epistemic uncertainty, about the unknown objective function, and aleatoric uncertainty, which comes from noisy observations and cannot be reduced. In effect, only the former is important for efficient exploration. Based on this, we propose several new acquisition functions that outperform state-of-the-art heuristics in binary and preferential BO, while being fast to compute and easy to implement. We then generalize these acquisition rules to batch learning, where multiple queries are performed simultaneously.

Traditionally, Bayesian network structure learning is often carried out at a central site, in which all data is gathered. However, in practice, data may be distributed across different parties (e.g., companies, devices) who intend to collectively learn a Bayesian network, but are not willing to disclose information related to their data owing to privacy or security concerns. In this work, we present a cross-silo federated learning approach to estimate the structure of Bayesian network from data that is horizontally partitioned across different parties. We develop a distributed structure learning method based on continuous optimization, using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), such that only the model parameters have to be exchanged during the optimization process. We demonstrate the flexibility of our approach by adopting it for both linear and nonlinear cases. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets show that it achieves an improved performance over the other methods, especially when there is a relatively large number of clients and each has a limited sample size.

Network lasso is a method for solving a multi-task learning problem through the regularized maximum likelihood method. A characteristic of network lasso is setting a different model for each sample. The relationships among the models are represented by relational coefficients. A crucial issue in network lasso is to provide appropriate values for these relational coefficients. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian approach to solve multi-task learning problems by network lasso. This approach allows us to objectively determine the relational coefficients by Bayesian estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown in a simulation study and a real data analysis.

This study is motivated by the critical challenges in the biopharmaceutical manufacturing, including high complexity, high uncertainty, and very limited process data. Each experiment run is often very expensive. To support the optimal and robust process control, we propose a general green simulation assisted policy gradient (GS-PG) framework for both online and offline learning settings. Basically, to address the key limitations of state-of-art reinforcement learning (RL), such as sample inefficiency and low reliability, we create a mixture likelihood ratio based policy gradient estimation that can leverage on the information from historical experiments conducted under different inputs, including process model coefficients and decision policy parameters. Then, to accelerate the learning of optimal and robust policy, we further propose a variance reduction based sample selection method that allows GS-PG to intelligently select and reuse most relevant historical trajectories. The selection rule automatically updates the samples to be reused during the learning of process mechanisms and the search for optimal policy. Our theoretical and empirical studies demonstrate that the proposed framework can perform better than the state-of-art policy gradient approach and accelerate the optimal robust process control for complex stochastic systems under high uncertainty.

This dissertation studies a fundamental open challenge in deep learning theory: why do deep networks generalize well even while being overparameterized, unregularized and fitting the training data to zero error? In the first part of the thesis, we will empirically study how training deep networks via stochastic gradient descent implicitly controls the networks' capacity. Subsequently, to show how this leads to better generalization, we will derive {\em data-dependent} {\em uniform-convergence-based} generalization bounds with improved dependencies on the parameter count. Uniform convergence has in fact been the most widely used tool in deep learning literature, thanks to its simplicity and generality. Given its popularity, in this thesis, we will also take a step back to identify the fundamental limits of uniform convergence as a tool to explain generalization. In particular, we will show that in some example overparameterized settings, {\em any} uniform convergence bound will provide only a vacuous generalization bound. With this realization in mind, in the last part of the thesis, we will change course and introduce an {\em empirical} technique to estimate generalization using unlabeled data. Our technique does not rely on any notion of uniform-convergece-based complexity and is remarkably precise. We will theoretically show why our technique enjoys such precision. We will conclude by discussing how future work could explore novel ways to incorporate distributional assumptions in generalization bounds (such as in the form of unlabeled data) and explore other tools to derive bounds, perhaps by modifying uniform convergence or by developing completely new tools altogether.

Policy gradient methods have become popular in multi-agent reinforcement learning, but they suffer from high variance due to the presence of environmental stochasticity and exploring agents (i.e., non-stationarity), which is potentially worsened by the difficulty in credit assignment. As a result, there is a need for a method that is not only capable of efficiently solving the above two problems but also robust enough to solve a variety of tasks. To this end, we propose a new multi-agent policy gradient method, called Robust Local Advantage (ROLA) Actor-Critic. ROLA allows each agent to learn an individual action-value function as a local critic as well as ameliorating environment non-stationarity via a novel centralized training approach based on a centralized critic. By using this local critic, each agent calculates a baseline to reduce variance on its policy gradient estimation, which results in an expected advantage action-value over other agents' choices that implicitly improves credit assignment. We evaluate ROLA across diverse benchmarks and show its robustness and effectiveness over a number of state-of-the-art multi-agent policy gradient algorithms.

We propose a variational Bayesian (VB) approach to learning distributions of latent variables in deep neural network (DNN) models for cross-domain knowledge transfer, to address acoustic mismatches between training and testing conditions. Instead of carrying out point estimation in conventional maximum a posteriori estimation with a risk of having a curse of dimensionality in estimating a huge number of model parameters, we focus our attention on estimating a manageable number of latent variables of DNNs via a VB inference framework. To accomplish model transfer, knowledge learnt from a source domain is encoded in prior distributions of latent variables and optimally combined, in a Bayesian sense, with a small set of adaptation data from a target domain to approximate the corresponding posterior distributions. Experimental results on device adaptation in acoustic scene classification show that our proposed VB approach can obtain good improvements on target devices, and consistently outperforms 13 state-of-the-art knowledge transfer algorithms.