We introduce a novel generative formulation of deep probabilistic models implementing "soft" constraints on their function dynamics. In particular, we develop a flexible methodological framework where the modeled functions and derivatives of a given order are subject to inequality or equality constraints. We then characterize the posterior distribution over model and constraint parameters through stochastic variational inference. As a result, the proposed approach allows for accurate and scalable uncertainty quantification on the predictions and on all parameters. We demonstrate the application of equality constraints in the challenging problem of parameter inference in ordinary differential equation models, while we showcase the application of inequality constraints on the problem of monotonic regression of count data. The proposed approach is extensively tested in several experimental settings, leading to highly competitive results in challenging modeling applications, while offering high expressiveness, flexibility and scalability.

Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring the reward function of an observed agent, given its policy or behavior. Researchers perceive IRL both as a problem and as a class of methods. By categorically surveying the current literature in IRL, this article serves as a reference for researchers and practitioners in machine learning to understand the challenges of IRL and select the approaches best suited for the problem on hand. The survey formally introduces the IRL problem along with its central challenges which include accurate inference, generalizability, correctness of prior knowledge, and growth in solution complexity with problem size. The article elaborates how the current methods mitigate these challenges. We further discuss the extensions of traditional IRL methods: (i) inaccurate and incomplete perception, (ii) incomplete model, (iii) multiple rewards, and (iv) non-linear reward functions. This discussion concludes with some broad advances in the research area and currently open research questions.

We present a first attempt to perform attentional word segmentation directly from the speech signal, with the final goal to automatically identify lexical units in a low-resource, unwritten language (UL). Our methodology assumes a pairing between recordings in the UL with translations in a well-resourced language. It uses Acoustic Unit Discovery (AUD) to convert speech into a sequence of pseudo-phones that is segmented using neural soft-alignments produced by a neural machine translation model. Evaluation uses an actual Bantu UL, Mboshi; comparisons to monolingual and bilingual baselines illustrate the potential of attentional word segmentation for language documentation.

Binary classification is one of the most common problem in machine learning. It consists in predicting whether a given element is of a particular class. In this paper, a new algorithm for binary classification is proposed using a hypergraph representation. Each element to be classified is partitioned according to its interactions with the training set. For each class, the total support is calculated as a convex combination of the {\it evidence} strength of the element of the partition. The evidence measure is pre-computed using the hypergraph induced by the training set and iteratively adjusted through a training phase. It does not require structured information, each case being represented by a set of {\it agnostic information} atoms. Empirical validation demonstrates its high potential on a wide range of well-known datasets and the results are compared to the state-of-art. The time complexity is given and empirically validated. Its capacity to provide good performances without hyperparameter tuning compared to standard classification methods is studied. Finally, the limitation of the model space is discussed and some potential solutions proposed.

Since their early days, humans have had an important, often antagonistic relationship with uncertainty; we try to kill it everywhere we find it. Without an explanation for many natural phenomena, humans invented gods to explain them, and without certainty of the future, they consulted oracles. It was precisely the oracle's role to reduce uncertainty for their fellow humans, predicting their future and giving counsel according to their gods' will, and even though their accuracy left much to be desired, they were believed, for any measure of certainty is better than none. As society grew sophisticated, oracles were (not completely) displaced by empiric thought, which proved much more successful at prediction and counsel. Empiricism itself evolved into the collection of techniques we call the scientific method, which has proven to be much more effective at reducing uncertainty, and is modern society's most trustworthy way of producing predictions.

Gibbs sampling is a Markov chain Monte Carlo method that is one of the most widespread techniques used with graphical models [7]. Gibbs sampling is an iterative method that repeatedly resamples a variable in the model from its conditional distribution, a process that is guaranteed to converge asymptotically to the desired distribution. Since these updates are typically simple and fast to run, Gibbs sampling can be applied to a variety of problems, and has been used for inference on large-scale graphical models in many systems [11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21]. Unfortunately, for large graphical models with many factors, the computational cost of running an iteration of Gibbs sampling can become prohibitive. Even though Gibbs sampling is a graph-local algorithm, in the sense that each update only needs to reference data associated with a local neighborhood of the factor graph, as graphs become large and highly connected, even these local neighborhoods can become huge.

Variable clustering is important for explanatory analysis. However, only few dedicated methods for variable clustering with the Gaussian graphical model have been proposed. Even more severe, small insignificant partial correlations due to noise can dramatically change the clustering result when evaluating for example with the Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC). In this work, we try to address this issue by proposing a Bayesian model that accounts for negligible small, but not necessarily zero, partial correlations. Based on our model, we propose to evaluate a variable clustering result using the marginal likelihood. To address the intractable calculation of the marginal likelihood, we propose two solutions: one based on a variational approximation, and another based on MCMC. Experiments on simulated data shows that the proposed method is similarly accurate as BIC in the no noise setting, but considerably more accurate when there are noisy partial correlations. Furthermore, on real data the proposed method provides clustering results that are intuitively sensible, which is not always the case when using BIC or its extensions.

Recently, deep neural network (DNN) has made a breakthrough in monaural source enhancement. Through a training step by using a large amount of data, DNN estimates a mapping between mixed signals and clean signals. At this time, we use an objective function that numerically expresses the quality of a mapping by DNN. In the conventional methods, L1 norm, L2 norm, and Itakura-Saito divergence are often used as objective functions. Recently, an objective function based on short-time objective intelligibility (STOI) has also been proposed. However, these functions only indicate similarity between the clean signal and the estimated signal by DNN. In other words, they do not show the quality of noise reduction or source enhancement. Motivated by the fact, this paper adopts signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) as the objective function. Since SDR virtually shows signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), maximizing SDR solves the above problem. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method achieved better performance than the conventional methods.

This paper proposes a new method for solving the well-known rank aggregation problem from pairwise comparisons using the method of low-rank matrix completion. The partial and noisy data of pairwise comparisons is transformed into a matrix form. We then use tools from matrix completion, which has served as a major component in the low-rank completion solution of the Netflix challenge, to construct the preference of the different objects. In our approach, the data of multiple comparisons is used to create an estimate of the probability of object i to win (or be chosen) over object j, where only a partial set of comparisons between N objects is known. The data is then transformed into a matrix form for which the noiseless solution has a known rank of one. An alternating minimization algorithm, in which the target matrix takes a bilinear form, is then used in combination with maximum likelihood estimation for both factors. The reconstructed matrix is used to obtain the true underlying preference intensity. This work demonstrates the improvement of our proposed algorithm over the current state-of-the-art in both simulated scenarios and real data.

Our goal is to synthesize controllers for robots that provably generalize well to novel environments given a dataset of example environments. The key technical idea behind our approach is to leverage tools from generalization theory in machine learning by exploiting a precise analogy (which we present in the form of a reduction) between robustness of controllers to novel environments and generalization of hypotheses in supervised learning. In particular, we utilize the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC)-Bayes framework, which allows us to obtain upper bounds (that hold with high probability) on the expected cost of (stochastic) controllers across novel environments. We propose control synthesis algorithms that explicitly seek to minimize this upper bound. The corresponding optimization problem can be solved using convex optimization (Relative Entropy Programming in particular) in the setting where we are optimizing over a finite control policy space. In the more general setting of continuously parameterized controllers, we minimize this upper bound using stochastic gradient descent. We present examples of our approach in the context of obstacle avoidance control with depth measurements. Our simulated examples demonstrate the potential of our approach to provide strong generalization guarantees on controllers for robotic systems with continuous state and action spaces, complicated (e.g., nonlinear) dynamics, and rich sensory inputs (e.g., depth measurements).