As machine learning techniques are applied to a widening range of applications, high throughput machine learning (ML) inference servers have become critical for online service applications. Such ML inference servers pose two challenges: first, they must provide a bounded latency for each request to support consistent service-level objective (SLO), and second, they can serve multiple heterogeneous ML models in a system as certain tasks involve invocation of multiple models and consolidating multiple models can improve system utilization. To address the two requirements of ML inference servers, this paper proposes a new ML inference scheduling framework for multi-model ML inference servers. The paper first shows that with SLO constraints, current GPUs are not fully utilized for ML inference tasks. To maximize the resource efficiency of inference servers, a key mechanism proposed in this paper is to exploit hardware support for spatial partitioning of GPU resources. With the partitioning mechanism, a new abstraction layer of GPU resources is created with configurable GPU resources. The scheduler assigns requests to virtual GPUs, called gpu-lets, with the most effective amount of resources. The paper also investigates a remedy for potential interference effects when two ML tasks are running concurrently in a GPU. Our prototype implementation proves that spatial partitioning enhances throughput by 102.6% on average while satisfying SLOs.

Recent advances in deep learning have expanded possibilities to generate music, but generating a customizable full piece of music with consistent long-term structure remains a challenge. This paper introduces MusicFrameworks, a hierarchical music structure representation and a multi-step generative process to create a full-length melody guided by long-term repetitive structure, chord, melodic contour, and rhythm constraints. We first organize the full melody with section and phrase-level structure. To generate melody in each phrase, we generate rhythm and basic melody using two separate transformer-based networks, and then generate the melody conditioned on the basic melody, rhythm and chords in an auto-regressive manner. By factoring music generation into sub-problems, our approach allows simpler models and requires less data. To customize or add variety, one can alter chords, basic melody, and rhythm structure in the music frameworks, letting our networks generate the melody accordingly. Additionally, we introduce new features to encode musical positional information, rhythm patterns, and melodic contours based on musical domain knowledge. A listening test reveals that melodies generated by our method are rated as good as or better than human-composed music in the POP909 dataset about half the time.

Automatic hate speech detection is hampered by the scarcity of labeled datasetd, leading to poor generalization. We employ pretrained language models (LMs) to alleviate this data bottleneck. We utilize the GPT LM for generating large amounts of synthetic hate speech sequences from available labeled examples, and leverage the generated data in fine-tuning large pretrained LMs on hate detection. An empirical study using the models of BERT, RoBERTa and ALBERT, shows that this approach improves generalization significantly and consistently within and across data distributions. In fact, we find that generating relevant labeled hate speech sequences is preferable to using out-of-domain, and sometimes also within-domain, human-labeled examples.

Recent advance in classical reinforcement learning (RL) and quantum computation (QC) points to a promising direction of performing RL on a quantum computer. However, potential applications in quantum RL are limited by the number of qubits available in the modern quantum devices. Here we present two frameworks of deep quantum RL tasks using a gradient-free evolution optimization: First, we apply the amplitude encoding scheme to the Cart-Pole problem; Second, we propose a hybrid framework where the quantum RL agents are equipped with hybrid tensor network-variational quantum circuit (TN-VQC) architecture to handle inputs with dimensions exceeding the number of qubits. This allows us to perform quantum RL on the MiniGrid environment with 147-dimensional inputs. We demonstrate the quantum advantage of parameter saving using the amplitude encoding. The hybrid TN-VQC architecture provides a natural way to perform efficient compression of the input dimension, enabling further quantum RL applications on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.

Can machines learn to use a search engine as an interactive tool for finding information? That would have far reaching consequences for making the world's knowledge more accessible. This paper presents first steps in designing agents that learn meta-strategies for contextual query refinements. Our approach uses machine reading to guide the selection of refinement terms from aggregated search results. Agents are then empowered with simple but effective search operators to exert fine-grained and transparent control over queries and search results. We develop a novel way of generating synthetic search sessions, which leverages the power of transformer-based generative language models through (self-)supervised learning. We also present a reinforcement learning agent with dynamically constrained actions that can learn interactive search strategies completely from scratch. In both cases, we obtain significant improvements over one-shot search with a strong information retrieval baseline. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis of the learned search policies.

The powerful learning ability of deep neural networks enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn competent control policies directly from high-dimensional and continuous environments. In theory, to achieve stable performance, neural networks assume i.i.d. inputs, which unfortunately does no hold in the general RL paradigm where the training data is temporally correlated and non-stationary. This issue may lead to the phenomenon of "catastrophic interference" and the collapse in performance as later training is likely to overwrite and interfer with previously learned policies. In this paper, we introduce the concept of "context" into single-task RL and develop a novel scheme, termed as Context Division and Knowledge Distillation (CDaKD) driven RL, to divide all states experienced during training into a series of contexts. Its motivation is to mitigate the challenge of aforementioned catastrophic interference in deep RL, thereby improving the stability and plasticity of RL models. At the heart of CDaKD is a value function, parameterized by a neural network feature extractor shared across all contexts, and a set of output heads, each specializing on an individual context. In CDaKD, we exploit online clustering to achieve context division, and interference is further alleviated by a knowledge distillation regularization term on the output layers for learned contexts. In addition, to effectively obtain the context division in high-dimensional state spaces (e.g., image inputs), we perform clustering in the lower-dimensional representation space of a randomly initialized convolutional encoder, which is fixed throughout training. Our results show that, with various replay memory capacities, CDaKD can consistently improve the performance of existing RL algorithms on classic OpenAI Gym tasks and the more complex high-dimensional Atari tasks, incurring only moderate computational overhead.

When manipulating objects, humans finely adapt their motions to the characteristics of what they are handling. Thus, an attentive observer can foresee hidden properties of the manipulated object, such as its weight, temperature, and even whether it requires special care in manipulation. This study is a step towards endowing a humanoid robot with this last capability. Specifically, we study how a robot can infer online, from vision alone, whether or not the human partner is careful when moving an object. We demonstrated that a humanoid robot could perform this inference with high accuracy (up to 81.3%) even with a low-resolution camera. Only for short movements without obstacles, carefulness recognition was insufficient. The prompt recognition of movement carefulness from observing the partner's action will allow robots to adapt their actions on the object to show the same degree of care as their human partners.

This paper presents key principles and solutions to the challenges faced in designing a domain-specific conversational agent for the legal domain. It includes issues of scope, platform, architecture and preparation of input data. It provides functionality in answering user queries and recording user information including contact details and case-related information. It utilises deep learning technology built upon Amazon Web Services (aws) lex in combination with aws Lambda. Due to lack of publicly available data, we identified two methods including crowdsourcing experiments and archived enquiries to develop a number of linguistic resources. This includes a training dataset, set of predetermined responses for the conversational agent, a set of regression test cases and a further conversation test set. We propose a hierarchical bot structure that facilitates multi-level delegation and report model accuracy on the regression test set. Additionally, we highlight features that are added to the bot to improve the conversation flow and overall user experience.

Since the federated learning, which makes AI learning possible without moving local data around, was introduced by google in 2017 it has been actively studied particularly in the field of medicine. In fact, the idea of machine learning in AI without collecting data from local clients is very attractive because data remain in local sites. However, federated learning techniques still have various open issues due to its own characteristics such as non identical distribution, client participation management, and vulnerable environments. In this presentation, the current issues to make federated learning flawlessly useful in the real world will be briefly overviewed. They are related to data/system heterogeneity, client management, traceability, and security. Also, we introduce the modularized federated learning framework, we currently develop, to experiment various techniques and protocols to find solutions for aforementioned issues. The framework will be open to public after development completes.

In this paper, we introduce a novel deep learning based solution to the Powered-Descent Guidance (PDG) problem, grounded in principles of nonlinear Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Feynman-Kac theory. Our algorithm solves the PDG problem by framing it as an $\mathcal{L}^1$ SOC problem for minimum fuel consumption. Additionally, it can handle practically useful control constraints, nonlinear dynamics and enforces state constraints as soft-constraints. This is achieved by building off of recent work on deep Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (FBSDEs) and differentiable non-convex optimization neural-network layers based on stochastic search. In contrast to previous approaches, our algorithm does not require convexification of the constraints or linearization of the dynamics and is empirically shown to be robust to stochastic disturbances and the initial position of the spacecraft. After training offline, our controller can be activated once the spacecraft is within a pre-specified radius of the landing zone and at a pre-specified altitude i.e., the base of an inverted cone with the tip at the landing zone. We demonstrate empirically that our controller can successfully and safely land all trajectories initialized at the base of this cone while minimizing fuel consumption.