This paper introduces the 2019 version of \us{}, a novel Constraint Programming framework for floating point verification problems expressed with the SMT language of SMTLIB. SMT solvers decompose their task by delegating to specific theories (e.g., floating point, bit vectors, arrays, ...) the task to reason about combinatorial or otherwise complex constraints for which the SAT encoding would be cumbersome or ineffective. This decomposition and encoding processes lead to the obfuscation of the high-level constraints and a loss of information on the structure of the combinatorial model. In \us{}, constraints over the floats are first class objects, and the purpose is to expose and exploit structures of floating point domains to enhance the search process. A symbolic phase rewrites each SMTLIB instance to elementary constraints, and eliminates auxiliary variables whose presence is counterproductive. A diversification technique within the search steers it away from costly enumerations in unproductive areas of the search space. The empirical evaluation demonstrates that the 2019 version of \us{} is competitive on computationally challenging floating point benchmarks that induce significant search efforts even for other CP solvers. It highlights that the ability to harness both inference and search is critical. Indeed, it yields a factor 3 improvement over Colibri and is up to 10 times faster than SMT solvers. The evaluation was conducted over 214 benchmarks (The Griggio suite) which is a standard within SMTLIB.

In visual planning (VP), an agent learns to plan goal-directed behavior from observations of a dynamical system obtained offline, e.g., images obtained from self-supervised robot interaction. Most previous works on VP approached the problem by planning in a learned latent space, resulting in low-quality visual plans, and difficult training algorithms. Here, instead, we propose a simple VP method that plans directly in image space and displays competitive performance. We build on the semi-parametric topological memory (SPTM) method: image samples are treated as nodes in a graph, the graph connectivity is learned from image sequence data, and planning can be performed using conventional graph search methods. We propose two modifications on SPTM. First, we train an energy-based graph connectivity function using contrastive predictive coding that admits stable training. Second, to allow zero-shot planning in new domains, we learn a conditional VAE model that generates images given a context of the domain, and use these hallucinated samples for building the connectivity graph and planning. We show that this simple approach significantly outperform the state-of-the-art VP methods, in terms of both plan interpretability and success rate when using the plan to guide a trajectory-following controller. Interestingly, our method can pick up non-trivial visual properties of objects, such as their geometry, and account for it in the plans.

We study minimax methods for off-policy evaluation (OPE) using value-functions and marginalized importance weights. Despite that they hold promises of overcoming the exponential variance in traditional importance sampling, several key problems remain: (1) They require function approximation and are generally biased. For the sake of trustworthy OPE, is there anyway to quantify the biases? (2) They are split into two styles ("weight-learning" vs "value-learning"). Can we unify them? In this paper we answer both questions positively. By slightly altering the derivation of previous methods (one from each style; Uehara et al., 2019), we unify them into a single confidence interval (CI) that automatically comes with a special type of double robustness: when either the value-function or importance weight class is well-specified, the CI is valid and its length quantifies the misspecification of the other class. We can also tell which class is misspecified, which provides useful diagnostic information for the design of function approximation. Our CI also provides a unified view of and new insights to some recent methods: for example, one side of the CI recovers a version of AlgaeDICE (Nachum et al., 2019b), and we show that the two sides need to be used together and either alone may incur doubled approximation error as a point estimate. We further examine the potential of applying these bounds to two long-standing problems: off-policy policy optimization with poor data coverage (i.e., exploitation), and systematic exploration. With a well-specified value-function class, we show that optimizing the lower and the upper bounds lead to effective exploitation and exploration, respectively. Our results also suggests an interesting assymetry between exploration and exploitation, that the former might require substantially weaker realizability assumptions than the latter.

We present TaskSet, a dataset of tasks for use in training and evaluating optimizers. TaskSet is unique in its size and diversity, containing over a thousand tasks ranging from image classification with fully connected or convolutional neural networks, to variational autoencoders, to non-volume preserving flows on a variety of datasets. As an example application of such a dataset we explore meta-learning an ordered list of hyperparameters to try sequentially. By learning this hyperparameter list from data generated using TaskSet we achieve large speedups in sample efficiency over random search. Next we use the diversity of the TaskSet and our method for learning hyperparameter lists to empirically explore the generalization of these lists to new optimization tasks in a variety of settings including ImageNet classification with Resnet50 and LM1B language modeling with transformers. As part of this work we have opensourced code for all tasks, as well as ~29 million training curves for these problems and the corresponding hyperparameters.

The maximum vertex weight clique problem (MVWCP) is an important generalization of the maximum clique problem (MCP) that has a wide range of real-world applications. In situations where rigorous guarantees regarding the optimality of solutions are not required, MVWCP is usually solved using stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms, which also define the state of the art for solving this problem. However, there is no single SLS algorithm which gives the best performance across all classes of MVWCP instances, and it is challenging to effectively identify the most suitable algorithm for each class of MVWCP instances. In this work, we follow the paradigm of Programming by Optimization (PbO) to develop a new, flexible and highly parametric SLS framework for solving MVWCP, combining, for the first time, a broad range of effective heuristic mechanisms. By automatically configuring this PbO-MWC framework, we achieve substantial advances in the state-of-the-art in solving MVWCP over a broad range of prominent benchmarks, including two derived from real-world applications in transplantation medicine (kidney exchange) and assessment of research excellence.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a class of sample-efficient global optimization methods, where a probabilistic model conditioned on previous observations is used to determine future evaluations via the optimization of an acquisition function. Most acquisition functions are myopic, meaning that they only consider the impact of the next function evaluation. Non-myopic acquisition functions consider the impact of the next $h$ function evaluations and are typically computed through rollout, in which $h$ steps of BO are simulated. These rollout acquisition functions are defined as $h$-dimensional integrals, and are expensive to compute and optimize. We show that a combination of quasi-Monte Carlo, common random numbers, and control variates significantly reduce the computational burden of rollout. We then formulate a policy-search based approach that removes the need to optimize the rollout acquisition function. Finally, we discuss the qualitative behavior of rollout policies in the setting of multi-modal objectives and model error.

Partial monitoring is a rich framework for sequential decision making under uncertainty that generalizes many well known bandit models, including linear, combinatorial and dueling bandits. We introduce information directed sampling (IDS) for stochastic partial monitoring with a linear reward and observation structure. IDS achieves adaptive worst-case regret rates that depend on precise observability conditions of the game. Moreover, we prove lower bounds that classify the minimax regret of all finite games into four possible regimes. IDS achieves the optimal rate in all cases up to logarithmic factors, without tuning any hyper-parameters. We further extend our results to the contextual and the kernelized setting, which significantly increases the range of possible applications.

This paper reviews the field of Game AI, which not only deals with creating agents that can play a certain game, but also with areas as diverse as creating game content automatically, game analytics, or player modelling. While Game AI was for a long time not very well recognized by the larger scientific community, it has established itself as a research area for developing and testing the most advanced forms of AI algorithms and articles covering advances in mastering video games such as StarCraft 2 and Quake III appear in the most prestigious journals. Because of the growth of the field, a single review cannot cover it completely. Therefore, we put a focus on important recent developments, including that advances in Game AI are starting to be extended to areas outside of games, such as robotics or the synthesis of chemicals. In this article, we review the algorithms and methods that have paved the way for these breakthroughs, report on the other important areas of Game AI research, and also point out exciting directions for the future of Game AI.

We demonstrate that model-based derivative free optimisation algorithms can generate adversarial targeted misclassification of deep networks using fewer network queries than non-model-based methods. Specifically, we consider the black-box setting, and show that the number of networks queries is less impacted by making the task more challenging either through reducing the allowed $\ell^{\infty}$ perturbation energy or training the network with defences against adversarial misclassification. We illustrate this by contrasting the BOBYQA algorithm with the state-of-the-art model-free adversarial targeted misclassification approaches based on genetic, combinatorial, and direct-search algorithms. We observe that for high $\ell^{\infty}$ energy perturbations on networks, the aforementioned simpler model-free methods require the fewest queries. In contrast, the proposed BOBYQA based method achieves state-of-the-art results when the perturbation energy decreases, or if the network is trained against adversarial perturbations.

Feature Selection (FS) is a key task in Machine Learning. It consists in selecting a number of relevant variables for the model construction or data analysis. We present the R package, FSinR, which implements a variety of widely known filter and wrapper methods, as well as search algorithms. Thus, the package provides the possibility to perform the feature selection process, which consists in the combination of a guided search on the subsets of features with the filter or wrapper methods that return an evaluation measure of those subsets. In this article, we also present some examples on the usage of the package and a comparison with other packages available in R that contain methods for feature selection.