We present a new experiment demonstrating destructive interference in customers' estimates of conditional probabilities of product failure. We take the perspective of a manufacturer of consumer products, and consider two situations of cause and effect. Whereas individually the effect of the causes is similar, it is observed that when combined, the two causes produce the opposite effect. Such negative interference of two or more reasons may be exploited for better modeling the cognitive processes taking place in the customers' mind. Doing so can enhance the likelihood that a manufacturer will be able to design a better product, or a feature within it. Quantum probability has been used to explain some commonly observed deviations such as question order and response replicability effects, as well as in explaining paradoxes such as violations of the sure-thing principle, and Machina and Ellsberg paradoxes. In this work, we present results from a survey conducted regarding the effect of multiple observed symptoms on the drivability of a vehicle. We demonstrate that the set of responses cannot be explained using classical probability, but quantum formulation easily models it, as it allows for both positive and negative "interference" between events. Since quantum formulism also accounts for classical probability's predictions, it serves as a richer paradigm for modeling decision making behavior in engineering design and behavioral economics.

In this paper, we propose a max-min entropy framework for reinforcement learning (RL) to overcome the limitation of the maximum entropy RL framework in model-free sample-based learning. Whereas the maximum entropy RL framework guides learning for policies to reach states with high entropy in the future, the proposed max-min entropy framework aims to learn to visit states with low entropy and maximize the entropy of these low-entropy states to promote exploration. For general Markov decision processes (MDPs), an efficient algorithm is constructed under the proposed max-min entropy framework based on disentanglement of exploration and exploitation. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm yields drastic performance improvement over the current state-of-the-art RL algorithms.

We propose a fully Bayesian framework for learning ground truth labels from noisy annotators. Our framework ensures scalability by factoring a generative, Bayesian soft clustering model over label distributions into the classic David and Skene joint annotator-data model. Earlier research along these lines has neither fully incorporated label distributions nor explored clustering by annotators only or data only. Our framework incorporates all of these properties as: (1) a graphical model designed to provide better ground truth estimates of annotator responses as input to \emph{any} black box supervised learning algorithm, and (2) a standalone neural model whose internal structure captures many of the properties of the graphical model. We conduct supervised learning experiments using both models and compare them to the performance of one baseline and a state-of-the-art model.

The evaluation of rare but high-stakes events remains one of the main difficulties in obtaining reliable policies from intelligent agents, especially in large or continuous state/action spaces where limited scalability enforces the use of a prohibitively large number of testing iterations. On the other hand, a biased or inaccurate policy evaluation in a safety-critical system could potentially cause unexpected catastrophic failures during deployment. In this paper, we propose the Accelerated Policy Evaluation (APE) method, which simultaneously uncovers rare events and estimates the rare event probability in Markov decision processes. The APE method treats the environment nature as an adversarial agent and learns towards, through adaptive importance sampling, the zero-variance sampling distribution for the policy evaluation. Moreover, APE is scalable to large discrete or continuous spaces by incorporating function approximators. We investigate the convergence properties of proposed algorithms under suitable regularity conditions. Our empirical studies show that APE estimates rare event probability with a smaller variance while only using orders of magnitude fewer samples compared to baseline methods in both multi-agent and single-agent environments.

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Probabilistic programming uses programs to express generative models whose posterior probability is then computed by built-in inference engines. A challenging goal is to develop general purpose inference algorithms that work out-of-the-box for arbitrary programs in a universal probabilistic programming language (PPL). The densities defined by such programs, which may use stochastic branching and recursion, are (in general) nonparametric, in the sense that they correspond to models on an infinite-dimensional parameter space. However standard inference algorithms, such as the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm, target distributions with a fixed number of parameters. This paper introduces the Nonparametric Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (NP-HMC) algorithm which generalises HMC to nonparametric models. Inputs to NP-HMC are a new class of measurable functions called "tree representable", which serve as a language-independent representation of the density functions of probabilistic programs in a universal PPL. We provide a correctness proof of NP-HMC, and empirically demonstrate significant performance improvements over existing approaches on several nonparametric examples.

Despite their compelling theoretical properties, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) tend to perform worse than frequentist methods in classification-based uncertainty quantification (UQ) tasks such as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and dataset-shift robustness. In this work, based on empirical findings in prior works, we hypothesize that this issue is due to the avoidance of Bayesian methods in the so-called "OOD training" -- a family of techniques for incorporating OOD data during training process, which has since been an integral part of state-of-the-art frequentist UQ methods. To validate this, we treat OOD data as a first-class citizen in BNN training by exploring four different ways of incorporating OOD data in Bayesian inference. We show in extensive experiments that OOD-trained BNNs are competitive to, if not better than recent frequentist baselines. This work thus provides strong baselines for future work in both Bayesian and frequentist UQ.

Food security is more prominent on the policy agenda today than it has been in the past, thanks to recent food shortages at both the regional and global levels as well as renewed promises from major donor countries to combat chronic hunger. One field where machine learning can be used is in the classification of household food insecurity. In this study, we establish a robust methodology to categorize whether or not a household is being food secure and food insecure by machine learning algorithms. In this study, we have used ten machine learning algorithms to classify the food security status of the Household. Gradient Boosting (GB), Random Forest (RF), Extra Tree (ET), Bagging, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Ada Boost (AB) and Naive Bayes were the classification algorithms used throughout this study (NB). Then, we perform classification tasks from developing data set for household food security status by gathering data from HICE survey data and validating it by Domain Experts. The performance of all classifiers has better results for all performance metrics. The performance of the Random Forest and Gradient Boosting models are outstanding with a testing accuracy of 0.9997 and the other classifier such as Bagging, Decision tree, Ada Boost, Extra tree, K-nearest neighbor, Logistic Regression, SVM and Naive Bayes are scored 0.9996, 0.09996, 0.9994, 0.95675, 0.9415, 0.8915, 0.7853 and 0.7595, respectively.

Inductive program synthesis, or inferring programs from examples of desired behavior, offers a general paradigm for building interpretable, robust, and generalizable machine learning systems. Effective program synthesis depends on two key ingredients: a strong library of functions from which to build programs, and an efficient search strategy for finding programs that solve a given task. We introduce LAPS (Language for Abstraction and Program Search), a technique for using natural language annotations to guide joint learning of libraries and neurally-guided search models for synthesis. When integrated into a state-of-the-art library learning system (DreamCoder), LAPS produces higher-quality libraries and improves search efficiency and generalization on three domains -- string editing, image composition, and abstract reasoning about scenes -- even when no natural language hints are available at test time.

Existing observational approaches for learning human preferences, such as inverse reinforcement learning, usually make strong assumptions about the observability of the human's environment. However, in reality, people make many important decisions under uncertainty. To better understand preference learning in these cases, we study the setting of inverse decision theory (IDT), a previously proposed framework where a human is observed making non-sequential binary decisions under uncertainty. In IDT, the human's preferences are conveyed through their loss function, which expresses a tradeoff between different types of mistakes. We give the first statistical analysis of IDT, providing conditions necessary to identify these preferences and characterizing the sample complexity -- the number of decisions that must be observed to learn the tradeoff the human is making to a desired precision. Interestingly, we show that it is actually easier to identify preferences when the decision problem is more uncertain. Furthermore, uncertain decision problems allow us to relax the unrealistic assumption that the human is an optimal decision maker but still identify their exact preferences; we give sample complexities in this suboptimal case as well. Our analysis contradicts the intuition that partial observability should make preference learning more difficult. It also provides a first step towards understanding and improving preference learning methods for uncertain and suboptimal humans.