As an example, consider clustering pixels in an image (or video) if they belong to the same object. Different clustering methods are obtained by using different notions of similarity and different representations of data points.

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic" reward. In this work, we focus on model uncertainty estimation as an intrinsic reward for efficient exploration. In particular, we introduce an implicit generative modeling approach to estimate a Bayesian uncertainty of the agent's belief of the environment dynamics. Each random draw from our generative model is a neural network that instantiates the dynamic function, hence multiple draws would approximate the posterior, and the variance in the future prediction based on this posterior is used as an intrinsic reward for exploration. We design a training algorithm for our generative model based on the amortized Stein Variational Gradient Descent. In experiments, we compare our implementation with state-of-the-art intrinsic reward-based exploration approaches, including two recent approaches based on an ensemble of dynamic models. In challenging exploration tasks, our implicit generative model consistently outperforms competing approaches regarding data efficiency in exploration.

In this work we perform a study of various unsupervised methods to identify mental stress in firefighter trainees based on unlabeled heart rate variability data. We collect RR interval time series data from nearly 100 firefighter trainees that participated in a drill. We explore and compare three methods in order to perform unsupervised stress detection: 1) traditional K-Means clustering with engineered time and frequency domain features 2) convolutional autoencoders and 3) long short-term memory (LSTM) autoencoders, both trained on the raw RRI measurements combined with DBSCAN clustering and K-Nearest-Neighbors classification. We demonstrate that K-Means combined with engineered features is unable to capture meaningful structure within the data. On the other hand, convolutional and LSTM autoencoders tend to extract varying structure from the data pointing to different clusters with different sizes of clusters. We attempt at identifying the true stressed and normal clusters using the HRV markers of mental stress reported in the literature. We demonstrate that the clusters produced by the convolutional autoencoders consistently and successfully stratify stressed versus normal samples, as validated by several established physiological stress markers such as RMSSD, Max-HR, Mean-HR and LF-HF ratio.

Jian Ding, Yihong Wu, Jiaming Xu, and Dana Yang November 20, 2019 Abstract Motivated by applications such as discovering strong ties in social networks and assembling genome subsequences in biology, we study the problem of recovering a hidden 2 k -nearest neighbor (NN) graph in an n -vertex complete graph, whose edge weights are independent and distributed according to P n for edges in the hidden 2 k -NN graph and Q n otherwise. We focus on two types of asymptotic recovery guarantees as n: (1) exact recovery: all edges are classified correctly with probability tending to one; (2) almost exact recovery: the expected number of misclassified edges is o (nk). We show that the maximum likelihood estimator achieves (1) exact recovery for 2 k n o(1) if lim inf 2α n log n 1; (2) almost exact recovery for 1 k o null log n log log nnull if lim inf kD ( P n Q n) log n 1, where α n null 2 log null dP ndQ n is the R enyi divergence of order 1 2 and D (P n Q n) is the Kullback-Leibler divergence.

We study high-dimensional sparse estimation tasks in a robust setting where a constant fraction of the dataset is adversarially corrupted. Specifically, we focus on the fundamental problems of robust sparse mean estimation and robust sparse PCA. We give the first practically viable robust estimators for these problems. In more detail, our algorithms are sample and computationally efficient and achieve near-optimal robustness guarantees. In contrast to prior provable algorithms which relied on the ellipsoid method, our algorithms use spectral techniques to iteratively remove outliers from the dataset. Our experimental evaluation on synthetic data shows that our algorithms are scalable and significantly outperform a range of previous approaches, nearly matching the best error rate without corruptions.

Addressing unfairness in rankings has become an increasingly important problem due to the growing influence of rankings in critical decision making, yet existing learning-to-rank algorithms suffer from multiple drawbacks when learning fair ranking policies from implicit feedback. Some algorithms suffer from extrinsic reasons of unfairness due to inherent selection biases in implicit feedback leading to rich-get-richer dynamics. While those that address the biased nature of implicit feedback suffer from intrinsic reasons of unfairness due to the lack of explicit control over the allocation of exposure based on merit (i.e, relevance). In both cases, the learned ranking policy can be unfair and lead to suboptimal results. To this end, we propose a novel learning-to-rank framework, FULTR, that is the first to address both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons of unfairness when learning ranking policies from logged implicit feedback. Considering the needs of various applications, we define a class of amortized fairness of exposure constraints with respect to items based on their merit, and propose corresponding counterfactual estimators of disparity (aka unfairness) and utility that are also robust to click noise. Furthermore, we provide an efficient algorithm that optimizes both utility and fairness via a policy-gradient approach. To show that our proposed algorithm learns accurate and fair ranking policies from biased and noisy feedback, we provide empirical results beyond the theoretical justification of the framework.

Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) is an important technique for dimensionality reduction of high-dimensional data. However, most existing sparse PCA algorithms are based on non-convex optimization, which provide little guarantee on the global convergence. Sparse PCA algorithms based on a convex formulation, for example the Fantope projection and selection (FPS), overcome this difficulty, but are computationally expensive. In this work we study sparse PCA based on the convex FPS formulation, and propose a new algorithm that is computationally efficient and applicable to large and high-dimensional data sets. Nonasymptotic and explicit bounds are derived for both the optimization error and the statistical accuracy, which can be used for testing and inference problems. We also extend our algorithm to online learning problems, where data are obtained in a streaming fashion. The proposed algorithm is applied to high-dimensional gene expression data for the detection of functional gene groups.

Outlier based Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) requires centering of the non-outliers. We show a "bias trick" that automatically centers these non-outliers. Using this bias trick we obtain the first RPCA algorithm that is optimal with respect to centering.

State-of-the-art adversarial attacks on neural networks use expensive iterative methods and numerous random restarts from different initial points. Iterative FGSM-based methods without restarts trade off performance for computational efficiency because they do not adequately explore the image space and are highly sensitive to the choice of step size. We propose a variant of Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) that uses a random step size to improve performance without resorting to expensive random restarts. Our method, Wide Iterative Stochastic crafting (WITCHcraft), achieves results superior to the classical PGD attack on the CIFAR-10 and MNIST data sets but without additional computational cost. This simple modification of PGD makes crafting attacks more economical, which is important in situations like adversarial training where attacks need to be crafted in real time.

Many real world tasks such as 3D object detection and high-resolution image classification involve learning from a set of instances. In these cases, only a group of instances, a set, collectively contains meaningful information and therefore only the sets have labels, and not individual data instances. In this work, we present a permutation invariant neural network called a \textbf{Memory-based Exchangeable Model (MEM)} for learning set functions. The model consists of memory units that embed an input sequence to high-level features (memories) enabling the model to learn inter-dependencies among instances of the set in the form of attention vectors. To demonstrate its learning ability, we evaluated our model on test datasets created using MNIST, point cloud classification, and population estimation. We also tested the model for classifying histopathology whole slide images to discriminate between two subtypes of Lung cancer---Lung Adenocarcinoma, and Lung Squamous Cell Carcinoma. We systematically extracted patches from lung cancer images from The Cancer Genome Atlas~(TCGA) dataset, the largest public repository of histopathology images. The proposed method achieved a competitive classification accuracy of 84.84\%. The results on other datasets are promising and demonstrate the efficacy of our model.