Learning suitable and well-performing dialogue behaviour in statistical spoken dialogue systems has been in the focus of research for many years. While most work which is based on reinforcement learning employs an objective measure like task success for modelling the reward signal, we use a reward based on user satisfaction estimation. We propose a novel estimator and show that it outperforms all previous estimators while learning temporal dependencies implicitly. Furthermore, we apply this novel user satisfaction estimation model live in simulated experiments where the satisfaction estimation model is trained on one domain and applied in many other domains which cover a similar task. We show that applying this model results in higher estimated satisfaction, similar task success rates and a higher robustness to noise.

A tensor provides a concise way to codify the interdependence of complex data. Treating a tensor as a d-way array, each entry records the interaction between the different indices. Clustering provides a way to parse the complexity of the data into more readily understandable information. Clustering methods are heavily dependent on the algorithm of choice, as well as the chosen hyperparameters of the algorithm. However, their sensitivity to data scales is largely unknown. In this work, we apply the discrete wavelet transform to analyze the effects of coarse-graining on clustering tensor data. We are particularly interested in understanding how scale effects clustering of the Earth's climate system. The discrete wavelet transform allows classification of the Earth's climate across a multitude of spatial-temporal scales. The discrete wavelet transform is used to produce an ensemble of classification estimates, as opposed to a single classification. Using information theory, we discover a sub-collection of the ensemble that span the majority of the variance observed, allowing for efficient consensus clustering techniques that can be used to identify climate biomes.

This paper shows that deep learning (DL) representations of data produced by generative adversarial nets (GANs) are random vectors which fall within the class of so-called \textit{concentrated} random vectors. Further exploiting the fact that Gram matrices, of the type $G = X^T X$ with $X=[x_1,\ldots,x_n]\in \mathbb{R}^{p\times n}$ and $x_i$ independent concentrated random vectors from a mixture model, behave asymptotically (as $n,p\to \infty$) as if the $x_i$ were drawn from a Gaussian mixture, suggests that DL representations of GAN-data can be fully described by their first two statistical moments for a wide range of standard classifiers. Our theoretical findings are validated by generating images with the BigGAN model and across different popular deep representation networks.

Certain type of documents such as tweets are collected by specifying a set of keywords. As topics of interest change with time it is beneficial to adjust keywords dynamically. The challenge is that these need to be specified ahead of knowing the forthcoming documents and the underlying topics. The future topics should mimic past topics of interest yet there should be some novelty in them. We develop a keyword-based topic model that dynamically selects a subset of keywords to be used to collect future documents. The generative process first selects keywords and then the underlying documents based on the specified keywords. The model is trained by using a variational lower bound and stochastic gradient optimization. The inference consists of finding a subset of keywords where given a subset the model predicts the underlying topic-word matrix for the unknown forthcoming documents. We compare the keyword topic model against a benchmark model using viral predictions of tweets combined with a topic model. The keyword-based topic model outperforms this sophisticated baseline model by 67%.

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately due to their applications in modern machine learning tasks. We first design and analyze the Zeroth-Order Gradient Descent Ascent (\texttt{ZO-GDA}) algorithm, and provide improved results compared to existing works, in terms of oracle complexity. Next, we propose the Zeroth-Order Gradient Descent Multi-Step Ascent (\texttt{ZO-GDMSA}) algorithm that significantly improves the oracle complexity of \texttt{ZO-GDA}. We also provide stochastic version of \texttt{ZO-GDA} and \texttt{ZO-GDMSA} to handle stochastic nonconvex minimax problems, and provide oracle complexity results.

In a polynomial regression model, the divisibility conditions implicit in polynomial hierarchy give way to a natural construction of constraints for the model parameters. We use this principle to derive versions of strong and weak hierarchy and to extend existing work in the literature, which at the moment is only concerned with models of degree two. We discuss how to estimate parameters in lasso using standard quadratic programming techniques and apply our proposal to both simulated data and examples from the literature. The proposed methodology compares favorably with existing techniques in terms of low validation error and model size.

The main objective of exams consists in performing an assessment of students' expertise on a specific subject. Such expertise, also referred to as skill or knowledge level, can then be leveraged in different ways (e.g., to assign a grade to the students, to understand whether a student might need some support, etc.). Similarly, the questions appearing in the exams have to be assessed in some way before being used to evaluate students. Standard approaches to questions' assessment are either subjective (e.g., assessment by human experts) or introduce a long delay in the process of question generation (e.g., pretesting with real students). In this work we introduce R2DE (which is a Regressor for Difficulty and Discrimination Estimation), a model capable of assessing newly generated multiple-choice questions by looking at the text of the question and the text of the possible choices. In particular, it can estimate the difficulty and the discrimination of each question, as they are defined in Item Response Theory. We also present the results of extensive experiments we carried out on a real world large scale dataset coming from an e-learning platform, showing that our model can be used to perform an initial assessment of newly created questions and ease some of the problems that arise in question generation.

A graph embedding is a representation of graph vertices in a low-dimensional space, which approximately preserves properties such as distances between nodes. Vertex sequence-based embedding procedures use features extracted from linear sequences of nodes to create embeddings using a neural network. In this paper, we propose diffusion graphs as a method to rapidly generate vertex sequences for network embedding. Its computational efficiency is superior to previous methods due to simpler sequence generation, and it produces more accurate results. In experiments, we found that the performance relative to other methods improves with increasing edge density in the graph. In a community detection task, clustering nodes in the embedding space produces better results compared to other sequence-based embedding methods.

Practitioners in diverse fields such as healthcare, economics and education are eager to apply machine learning to improve decision making. The cost and impracticality of performing experiments and a recent monumental increase in electronic record keeping has brought attention to the problem of evaluating decisions based on non-experimental observational data. This is the setting of this work. In particular, we study estimation of individual-level causal effects, such as a single patient's response to alternative medication, from recorded contexts, decisions and outcomes. We give generalization bounds on the error in estimated effects based on distance measures between groups receiving different treatments, allowing for sample re-weighting. We provide conditions under which our bound is tight and show how it relates to results for unsupervised domain adaptation. Led by our theoretical results, we devise representation learning algorithms that minimize our bound, by regularizing the representation's induced treatment group distance, and encourage sharing of information between treatment groups. We extend these algorithms to simultaneously learn a weighted representation to further reduce treatment group distances. Finally, an experimental evaluation on real and synthetic data shows the value of our proposed representation architecture and regularization scheme.

Transport demand is highly dependent on supply, especially for shared transport services where availability is often limited. As observed demand cannot be higher than available supply, historical transport data typically represents a biased, or censored, version of the true underlying demand pattern. Without explicitly accounting for this inherent distinction, predictive models of demand would necessarily represent a biased version of true demand, thus less effectively predicting the needs of service users. To counter this problem, we propose a general method for censorship-aware demand modeling, for which we devise a censored likelihood function. We apply this method to the task of shared mobility demand prediction by incorporating the censored likelihood within a Gaussian Process model, which can flexibly approximate arbitrary functional forms. Experiments on artificial and real-world datasets show how taking into account the limiting effect of supply on demand is essential in the process of obtaining an unbiased predictive model of user demand behavior.