Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are often used to model planning problems under uncertainty. The goal in Risk-Sensitive POMDPs (RS-POMDPs) is to find a policy that maximizes the probability that the cumulative cost is within some user-defined cost threshold. In this paper, unlike existing POMDP literature, we distinguish between the two cases of whether costs can or cannot be observed and show the empirical impact of cost observations. We also introduce a new search-based algorithm to solve RS-POMDPs and show that it is faster and more scalable than existing approaches in two synthetic domains and a taxi domain generated with real-world data.

Hierarchical latent tree analysis (HLTA) is recently proposed as a new method for topic detection. It differs fundamentally from the LDA-based methods in terms of topic definition, topic-document relationship, and learning method. It has been shown to discover significantly more coherent topics and better topic hierarchies. However, HLTA relies on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for parameter estimation and hence is not efficient enough to deal with large datasets. In this paper, we propose a method to drastically speed up HLTA using a technique inspired by the advances in the method of moments. Empirical experiments show that our method greatly improves the efficiency of HLTA. It is as efficient as the state-of-the-art LDA-based method for hierarchical topic detection and finds substantially better topics and topic hierarchies.

Plan monitoring in a collaborative multi-agent system requires an agent to not only monitor the execution of its own plan, but also to detect possible deviations or failures in the plan execution of its teammates. In domains featuring partial observability and uncertainty in the agents’ sensing and actuation, especially where communication among agents is sparse (as a part of a cost-minimized plan), plan monitoring can be a significant challenge. We design an Expectation Maximization (EM) based algorithm for detection of plan deviation of teammates in such a multi-agent system. However, a direct implementation of this algorithm is intractable, so we also design an alternative approach grounded on the agents’ plans, for tractability. We establish its equivalence to the intractable version, and evaluate these techniques in some challenging tasks.

Modeling document structure is of great importance for discourse analysis and related applications. The goal of this research is to capture the document intent structure by modeling documents as a mixture of topic words and rhetorical words. While the topics are relatively unchanged through one document, the rhetorical functions of sentences usually change following certain orders in discourse. We propose GMM-LDA, a topic modeling based Bayesian unsupervised model, to analyze the document intent structure cooperated with order information. Our model is flexible that has the ability to combine the annotations and do supervised learning. Additionally, entropic regularization can be introduced to model the significant divergence between topics and intents. We perform experiments in both unsupervised and supervised settings, results show the superiority of our model over several state-of-the-art baselines.

Modeling complex crowd behaviour for tasks such as rare event detection has received increasing interest. However, existing methods are limited because (1) they are sensitive to noise often resulting in a large number of false alarms; and (2) they rely on elaborate models leading to high computational cost thus unsuitable for processing a large number of video inputs in real-time. In this paper, we overcome these limitations by introducing a novel complex behaviour modeling framework, which consists of a Binarized Cumulative Directional (BCD) feature as representation, novel spatial and temporal context modeling via an iterative correlation maximization, and a set of behaviour models, each being a simple Bernoulli distribution. Despite its simplicity, our experiments on three benchmark datasets show that it significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art for both temporal video segmentation and rare event detection. Importantly, it is extremely efficient — reaches 90Hz on a normal PC platform using MATLAB.

In this paper, we focus on a novel knowledge reuse scenario where the knowledge in the source schema needs to be translated to a semantically heterogeneous target schema. We refer to this task as “knowledge translation” (KT). Unlike data translation and transfer learning, KT does not require any data from the source or target schema. We adopt a probabilistic approach to KT by representing the knowledge in the source schema, the mapping between the source and target schemas, and the resulting knowledge in the target schema all as probability distributions, specially using Markov random fields and Markov logic networks. Given the source knowledge and mappings, we use standard learning and inference algorithms for probabilistic graphical models to find an explicit probability distribution in the target schema that minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence from the implicit distribution. This gives us a compact probabilistic model that represents knowledge from the source schema as well as possible, respecting the uncertainty in both the source knowledge and the mapping. In experiments on both propositional and relational domains, we find that the knowledge obtained by KT is comparable to other approaches that require data, demonstrating that knowledge can be reused without data.

In multiagent e-marketplaces, buying agents need to select good sellers by querying other buyers (called advisors). Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) have shown to be an effective framework for optimally selecting sellers by selectively querying advisors. However, current solution methods do not scale to hundreds or even tens of agents operating in the e-market. In this paper, we propose the Mixture of POMDP Experts (MOPE) technique, which exploits the inherent structure of trust-based domains, such as the seller selection problem in e-markets, by aggregating the solutions of smaller sub-POMDPs. We propose a number of variants of the MOPE approach that we analyze theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that MOPE can scale up to a hundred agents thereby leveraging the presence of more advisors to significantly improve buyer satisfaction.

Videos can be conserved on different media. However, storing on media such as films and hard disks can suffer from unexpected data loss, for instance from physical damage. Repair of missing or damaged pixels is essential for video maintenance and preservation. Most methods seek to fill in missing holes by synthesizing similar textures from local or global frames. However, this can introduce incorrect contexts, especially when the missing hole or number of damaged frames is large. Furthermore, simple texture synthesis can introduce artifacts in undamaged and recovered areas. To address aforementioned problems, we propose the diversified dynamical Gaussian process latent variable model (D2GPLVM) for considering the variety in existing videos and thus introducing a diversity encouraging prior to inducing points. The aim is to ensure that the trained inducing points, which are a smaller set of all observed undamaged frames, are more diverse and resistant for context-aware and artifacts-free based video repair. The defined objective function in our proposed model is initially not analytically tractable and must be solved by variational inference. Finally, experimental testing illustrates the robustness and effectiveness of our method for damaged video repair.

Building accurate predictive models of clinical multivariate time series is crucial for understanding of the patient condition, the dynamics of a disease, and clinical decision making. A challenging aspect of this process is that the model should be flexible and adaptive to reflect well patient-specific temporal behaviors and this also in the case when the available patient-specific data are sparse and short span. To address this problem we propose and develop an adaptive two-stage forecasting approach for modeling multivariate, irregularly sampled clinical time series of varying lengths. The proposed model (1) learns the population trend from a collection of time series for past patients; (2) captures individual-specific short-term multivariate variability; and (3) adapts by automatically adjusting its predictions based on new observations. The proposed forecasting model is evaluated on a real-world clinical time series dataset. The results demonstrate that our approach is superior on the prediction tasks for multivariate, irregularly sampled clinical time series, and it outperforms both the population based and patient-specific time series prediction models in terms of prediction accuracy.

Neural language models are a powerful tool to embed words into semantic vector spaces. However, learning such models generally relies on the availability of abundant and diverse training examples. In highly specialised domains this requirement may not be met due to difficulties in obtaining a large corpus, or the limited range of expression in average use. Such domains may encode prior knowledge about entities in a knowledge base or ontology. We propose a generative model which integrates evidence from diverse data sources, enabling the sharing of semantic information. We achieve this by generalising the concept of co-occurrence from distributional semantics to include other relationships between entities or words, which we model as affine transformations on the embedding space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by outperforming recent models on a link prediction task and demonstrating its ability to profit from partially or fully unobserved data training labels. We further demonstrate the usefulness of learning from different data sources with overlapping vocabularies.