We present the Mixed Likelihood Gaussian process latent variable model (GP-LVM), capable of modeling data with attributes of different types. The standard formulation of GP-LVM assumes that each observation is drawn from a Gaussian distribution, which makes the model unsuited for data with e.g. categorical or nominal attributes. Our model, for which we use a sampling based variational inference, instead assumes a separate likelihood for each observed dimension. This formulation results in more meaningful latent representations, and give better predictive performance for real world data with dimensions of different types.

For reliable transmission across a noisy communication channel, classical results from information theory show that it is asymptotically optimal to separate out the source and channel coding processes. However, this decomposition can fall short in the finite bit-length regime, as it requires non-trivial tuning of hand-crafted codes and assumes infinite computational power for decoding. In this work, we propose Neural Error Correcting and Source Trimming (\modelname) codes to jointly learn the encoding and decoding processes in an end-to-end fashion. By adding noise into the latent codes to simulate the channel during training, we learn to both compress and error-correct given a fixed bit-length and computational budget. We obtain codes that are not only competitive against several capacity-approaching channel codes, but also learn useful robust representations of the data for downstream tasks such as classification. Finally, we learn an extremely fast neural decoder, yielding almost an order of magnitude in speedup compared to standard decoding methods based on iterative belief propagation.

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task objective. This gives rise to the agent alignment problem: how do we create agents that behave in accordance with the user's intentions? We outline a high-level research direction to solve the agent alignment problem centered around reward modeling: learning a reward function from interaction with the user and optimizing the learned reward function with reinforcement learning. We discuss the key challenges we expect to face when scaling reward modeling to complex and general domains, concrete approaches to mitigate these challenges, and ways to establish trust in the resulting agents.

Intersectionality is a framework that analyzes how interlocking systems of power and oppression affect individuals along overlapping dimensions including race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and disability. Intersectionality theory therefore implies it is important that fairness in artificial intelligence systems be protected with regard to multi-dimensional protected attributes. However, the measurement of fairness becomes statistically challenging in the multi-dimensional setting due to data sparsity, which increases rapidly in the number of dimensions, and in the values per dimension. We present a Bayesian probabilistic modeling approach for the reliable, data-efficient estimation of fairness with multi-dimensional protected attributes, which we apply to novel intersectional fairness metrics. Experimental results on census data and the COMPAS criminal justice recidivism dataset demonstrate the utility of our methodology, and show that Bayesian methods are valuable for the modeling and measurement of fairness in an intersectional context.

Reliable uncertainty quantification is a first step towards building explainable, transparent, and accountable artificial intelligent systems. Recent progress in Bayesian deep learning has made such quantification realizable. In this paper, we propose novel methods to study the benefits of characterizing model and data uncertainties for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. With empirical experiments on sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and language modeling using convolutional and recurrent neural network models, we show that explicitly modeling uncertainties is not only necessary to measure output confidence levels, but also useful at enhancing model performances in various NLP tasks.

In this paper we introduce a novel pattern match neural network architecture that uses neighbor similarity scores as features, eliminating the need for feature engineering in a disfluency detection task. We evaluate the approach in disfluency detection for four different speech genres, showing that the approach is as effective as hand-engineered pattern match features when used on in-domain data and achieves superior performance in cross-domain scenarios.

Humanoid robots have apparently similar body structure like human beings. Due to their technical design, they are sharing the same workspace with humans. They are placed to clean things, to assist old age people, to entertain us and most importantly to serve us. To be acceptable in the household, they must have higher level of intelligence than industrial robots and they must be social and capable of interacting people around it, who are not supposed to be robot specialist. All these come under the field of human robot interaction (HRI). There are various modes like speech, gesture, behavior etc. through which human can interact with robots. To solve all these challenges, a multimodel technique has been introduced where gesture as well as speech is used as a mode of interaction.

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), also known as energy disaggregation, is a blind source separation problem where a household's aggregate electricity consumption is broken down into electricity usages of individual appliances. In this way, the cost and trouble of installing many measurement devices over numerous household appliances can be avoided, and only one device needs to be installed. The problem has been well-known since Hart's seminal paper in 1992, and recently significant performance improvements have been achieved by adopting deep networks. In this work, we focus on the idea that appliances have on/off states, and develop a deep network for further performance improvements. Specifically, we propose a subtask gated network that combines the main regression network with an on/off classification subtask network. Unlike typical multitask learning algorithms where multiple tasks simply share the network parameters to take advantage of the relevance among tasks, the subtask gated network multiply the main network's regression output with the subtask's classification probability. When standby-power is additionally learned, the proposed solution surpasses the state-of-the-art performance for most of the benchmark cases. The subtask gated network can be very effective for any problem that inherently has on/off states.

This paper introduces a machine for sampling approximate model-X knockoffs for arbitrary and unspecified data distributions using deep generative models. The main idea is to iteratively refine a knockoff sampling mechanism until a criterion measuring the validity of the produced knockoffs is optimized; this criterion is inspired by the popular maximum mean discrepancy in machine learning and can be thought of as measuring the distance to pairwise exchangeability between original and knockoff features. By building upon the existing model-X framework, we thus obtain a flexible and model-free statistical tool to perform controlled variable selection. Extensive numerical experiments and quantitative tests confirm the generality, effectiveness, and power of our deep knockoff machines. Finally, we apply this new method to a real study of mutations linked to changes in drug resistance in the human immunodeficiency virus.

Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, while often powerful, can suffer from slow learning speeds, particularly in high dimensional spaces. Decomposition of tasks into a hierarchical structure holds the potential to significantly speed up learning, generalization, and transfer learning. However, the current task decomposition techniques often rely on high-level knowledge provided by an expert (e.g. using dynamic Bayesian networks) to extract a hierarchical task structure; which is not necessarily available in autonomous systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on Sequential Association Rule Mining that can extract Hierarchical Structure of Tasks in Reinforcement Learning (SARM-HSTRL) in an autonomous manner for both Markov decision processes (MDPs) and factored MDPs. The proposed method leverages association rule mining to discover the causal and temporal relationships among states in different trajectories, and extracts a task hierarchy that captures these relationships among sub-goals as termination conditions of different sub-tasks. We prove that the extracted hierarchical policy offers a hierarchically optimal policy in MDPs and factored MDPs. It should be noted that SARM-HSTRL extracts this hierarchical optimal policy without having dynamic Bayesian networks in scenarios with a single task trajectory and also with multiple tasks' trajectories. Furthermore, it has been theoretically and empirically shown that the extracted hierarchical task structure is consistent with trajectories and provides the most efficient, reliable, and compact structure under appropriate assumptions. The numerical results compare the performance of the proposed SARM-HSTRL method with conventional HRL algorithms in terms of the accuracy in detecting the sub-goals, the validity of the extracted hierarchies, and the speed of learning in several testbeds.