Within the realm of service robotics, researchers have placed a great amount of effort into learning motions and manipulations for task execution by robots. The task of robot learning is very broad, as it involves many tasks such as object detection, action recognition, motion planning, localization, knowledge representation and retrieval, and the intertwining of computer vision and machine learning techniques. In this paper, we focus on how knowledge can be gathered, represented, and reproduced to solve problems as done by researchers in the past decades. We discuss the problems which have existed in robot learning and the solutions, technologies or developments (if any) which have contributed to solving them. Specifically, we look at three broad categories involved in task representation and retrieval for robotics: 1) activity recognition from demonstrations, 2) scene understanding and interpretation, and 3) task representation in robotics - datasets and networks. Within each section, we discuss major breakthroughs and how their methods address present issues in robot learning and manipulation.

Smart-home is an application domain which brings together home automation and ambient intelligence to ease life of dwellers and to provide support to people in loss of autonomy. The development of smarthomes is not only a cultural and technological evolution but is also recognized as one way to address the challenges created by an aging population in developed countries [42]. If home automation is concerned with sensing (sensors, actuators, middle-ware) and low-level automation (heating control, lighting control), Ambient Intelligence should provide perception and reasoning capabilities into the smart-home ecosystem. However, although the development of smart-homes is supported by a large amount of research and industrial projects, it has not reached a large public since many challenges are still to be addressed. One of the main challenges is due to the complexity of setting up the smart-home system in case of new situations (devices, house, dwellers, after an accident, etc.).

Dropout, a stochastic regularisation technique for training of neural networks, has recently been reinterpreted as a specific type of approximate inference algorithm for Bayesian neural networks. The main contribution of the reinterpretation is in providing a theoretical framework useful for analysing and extending the algorithm. We show that the proposed framework suffers from several issues; from undefined or pathological behaviour of the true posterior related to use of improper priors, to an ill-defined variational objective due to singularity of the approximating distribution relative to the true posterior. Our analysis of the improper log uniform prior used in variational Gaussian dropout suggests the pathologies are generally irredeemable, and that the algorithm still works only because the variational formulation annuls some of the pathologies. To address the singularity issue, we proffer Quasi-KL (QKL) divergence, a new approximate inference objective for approximation of high-dimensional distributions. We show that motivations for variational Bernoulli dropout based on discretisation and noise have QKL as a limit. Properties of QKL are studied both theoretically and on a simple practical example which shows that the QKL-optimal approximation of a full rank Gaussian with a degenerate one naturally leads to the Principal Component Analysis solution.

We revisit logistic regression and its nonlinear extensions, including multilayer feedforward neural networks, by showing that these classifiers can be viewed as converting input or higher-level features into Dempster-Shafer mass functions and aggregating them by Dempster's rule of combination. The probabilistic outputs of these classifiers are the normalized plausibilities corresponding to the underlying combined mass function. This mass function is more informative than the output probability distribution. In particular, it makes it possible to distinguish between lack of evidence (when none of the features provides discriminant information) from conflicting evidence (when different features support different classes). This expressivity of mass functions allows us to gain insight into the role played by each input feature in logistic regression, and to interpret hidden unit outputs in multilayer neural networks. It also makes it possible to use alternative decision rules, such as interval dominance, which select a set of classes when the available evidence does not unambiguously point to a single class, thus trading reduced error rate for higher imprecision.

Active learning is relevant and challenging for high-dimensional regression models when the annotation of the samples is expensive. Yet most of the existing sampling methods cannot be applied to large-scale problems, consuming too much time for data processing. In this paper, we propose a fast active learning algorithm for regression, tailored for neural network models. It is based on uncertainty estimation from stochastic dropout output of the network. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show comparable or better performance (depending on the accuracy metric) as compared to the baselines. This approach can be generalized to other deep learning architectures. It can be used to systematically improve a machine-learning model as it offers a computationally efficient way of sampling additional data.

The article was written by Amber Zhou, a Financial Analyst at I Know First. Deep learning has become a buzzward in recent years. In fact, it has once gained much attention and excitements under the name neural networks early back in 1980's. However due to the lack of sufficient compute power and training examples, it gradually experienced a depression in the following decade. As we are entering the Era of Big Data in light of the explosion of computer power, deep learning has recently seen a revival.

In this article, I will provide a basic introduction to Bayesian learning and explore topics such as frequentist statistics, the drawbacks of the frequentist method, Bayes's theorem (introduced with an example), and the differences between the frequentist and Bayesian methods using the coin flip experiment as the example. To begin, let's try to answer this question: what is the frequentist method? When we flip a coin, there are two possible outcomes -- heads or tails. Of course, there is a third rare possibility where the coin balances on its edge without falling onto either side, which we assume is not a possible outcome of the coin flip for our discussion. We conduct a series of coin flips and record our observations i.e. the number of the heads (or tails) observed for a certain number of coin flips. In this experiment, we are trying to determine the fairness of the coin, using the number of heads (or tails) that we observe.

In this paper, we study the problem of data augmentation for language understanding in task-oriented dialogue system. In contrast to previous work which augments an utterance without considering its relation with other utterances, we propose a sequence-to-sequence generation based data augmentation framework that leverages one utterance's same semantic alternatives in the training data. A novel diversity rank is incorporated into the utterance representation to make the model produce diverse utterances and these diversely augmented utterances help to improve the language understanding module. Experimental results on the Airline Travel Information System dataset and a newly created semantic frame annotation on Stanford Multi-turn, Multidomain Dialogue Dataset show that our framework achieves significant improvements of 6.38 and 10.04 F-scores respectively when only a training set of hundreds utterances is represented. Case studies also confirm that our method generates diverse utterances.

Deep neural networks excel at function approximation, yet they are typically trained from scratch for each new function. On the other hand, Bayesian methods, such as Gaussian Processes (GPs), exploit prior knowledge to quickly infer the shape of a new function at test time. Yet GPs are computationally expensive, and it can be hard to design appropriate priors. In this paper we propose a family of neural models, Conditional Neural Processes (CNPs), that combine the benefits of both. CNPs are inspired by the flexibility of stochastic processes such as GPs, but are structured as neural networks and trained via gradient descent. CNPs make accurate predictions after observing only a handful of training data points, yet scale to complex functions and large datasets. We demonstrate the performance and versatility of the approach on a range of canonical machine learning tasks, including regression, classification and image completion.