Bayesian optimization has proven to be a highly effective methodology for the global optimization of unknown, expensive and multimodal functions. The ability to accurately model distributions over functions is critical to the effectiveness of Bayesian optimization. Although Gaussian processes provide a flexible prior over functions which can be queried efficiently, there are various classes of functions that remain difficult to model. One of the most frequently occurring of these is the class of non-stationary functions. The optimization of the hyperparameters of machine learning algorithms is a problem domain in which parameters are often manually transformed a priori, for example by optimizing in "log-space," to mitigate the effects of spatially-varying length scale. We develop a methodology for automatically learning a wide family of bijective transformations or warpings of the input space using the Beta cumulative distribution function. We further extend the warping framework to multi-task Bayesian optimization so that multiple tasks can be warped into a jointly stationary space. On a set of challenging benchmark optimization tasks, we observe that the inclusion of warping greatly improves on the state-of-the-art, producing better results faster and more reliably.

This paper presents foundational theoretical results on distributed parameter estimation for undirected probabilistic graphical models. It introduces a general condition on composite likelihood decompositions of these models which guarantees the global consistency of distributed estimators, provided the local estimators are consistent.

Gaussian graphical models (GGM) have been widely used in many high-dimensional applications ranging from biological and financial data to recommender systems. Sparsity in GGM plays a central role both statistically and computationally. Unfortunately, real-world data often does not fit well to sparse graphical models. In this paper, we focus on a family of latent variable Gaussian graphical models (LVGGM), where the model is conditionally sparse given latent variables, but marginally non-sparse. In LVGGM, the inverse covariance matrix has a low-rank plus sparse structure, and can be learned in a regularized maximum likelihood framework. We derive novel parameter estimation error bounds for LVGGM under mild conditions in the high-dimensional setting. These results complement the existing theory on the structural learning, and open up new possibilities of using LVGGM for statistical inference.

We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via an adversarial process, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game. In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to 1/2 everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the generated samples.

We introduce a Bayesian solution for the problem in forensic speaker recognition, where there may be very little background material for estimating score calibration parameters. We work within the Bayesian paradigm of evidence reporting and develop a principled probabilistic treatment of the problem, which results in a Bayesian likelihood-ratio as the vehicle for reporting weight of evidence. We show in contrast, that reporting a likelihood-ratio distribution does not solve this problem. Our solution is experimentally exercised on a simulated forensic scenario, using NIST SRE'12 scores, which demonstrates a clear advantage for the proposed method compared to the traditional plugin calibration recipe.

It is time-consuming and error-prone to implement inference procedures for each new probabilistic model. Probabilistic programming addresses this problem by allowing a user to specify the model and having a compiler automatically generate an inference procedure for it. For this approach to be practical, it is important to generate inference code that has reasonable performance. In this paper, we present a probabilistic programming language and compiler for Bayesian networks designed to make effective use of data-parallel architectures such as GPUs. Our language is fully integrated within the Scala programming language and benefits from tools such as IDE support, type-checking, and code completion. We show that the compiler can generate data-parallel inference code scalable to thousands of GPU cores by making use of the conditional independence relationships in the Bayesian network.

We investigate the use of a simple, discriminative reranking approach to plan recognition in an abductive setting. In contrast to recent work, which attempts to model abductive plan recognition using various formalisms that integrate logic and graphical models (such as Markov Logic Networks or Bayesian Logic Programs), we instead advocate a simpler, more flexible approach in which plans found through an abductive beam-search are discriminatively scored based on arbitrary features. We show that this approach performs well even with relatively few positive training examples, and we obtain state-of-the-art results on two abductive plan recognition datasets, outperforming more complicated systems.

Planning under uncertainty faces a scalability problem when considering multi-robot teams, as the information space scales exponentially with the number of robots. To address this issue, this paper proposes to decentralize multi-robot Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) while maintaining cooperation between robots by using POMDP policy auctions. Auctions provide a flexible way of coordinating individual policies modeled by POMDPs and have low communication requirements. Additionally, communication models in the multi-agent POMDP literature severely mismatch with real inter-robot communication. We address this issue by exploiting a decentralized data fusion method in order to efficiently maintain a joint belief state among the robots. The paper presents results in two different applications: environmental monitoring with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs); and cooperative tracking, in which several robots have to jointly track a moving target of interest.

Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) has been drawing great interest in recent years for planning under uncertainty. One of the key challenges is the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. To address this, we introduce a novel online planning algorithm for large POMDPs using Thompson sampling based MCTS that balances between cumulative and simple regrets. The proposed algorithm  Dirichlet-Dirichlet-NormalGamma based Partially Observable Monte-Carlo Planning (D 2 NG-POMCP) treats the accumulated reward of performing an action from a belief state in the MCTS search tree as a random variable following an unknown distribution with hidden parameters. Bayesian method is used to model and infer the posterior distribution of these parameters by choosing the conjugate prior in the form of a combination of two Dirichlet and one NormalGamma distributions. Thompson sampling is exploited to guide the action selection in the search tree. Experimental results confirmed that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on several common benchmark problems.

Solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) generally is computationally intractable. In this paper, we study a special POMDP class, namely informative POMDPs, where each observation provides good albeit incomplete information about world states. We propose two ways to accelerate value iteration algorithm for such POMDPs. First, dynamic programming (DP) updates can be carried out over a relatively small subset of belief space. Conducting DP updates over subspace leads to two advantages: representational savings in space and computational savings in time. Second, a point-based procedure is used to cut down the number of iterations for value iteration over subspace to converge. Empirical studies are presented to demonstrate various computational gains.