Regularization and Bayesian methods for system identification have been repopularized in the recent years, and proved to be competitive w.r.t. classical parametric approaches. In this paper we shall make an attempt to illustrate how the use of regularization in system identification has evolved over the years, starting from the early contributions both in the Automatic Control as well as Econometrics and Statistics literature. In particular we shall discuss some fundamental issues such as compound estimation problems and exchangeability which play and important role in regularization and Bayesian approaches, as also illustrated in early publications in Statistics. The historical and foundational issues will be given more emphasis (and space), at the expense of the more recent developments which are only briefly discussed. The main reason for such a choice is that, while the recent literature is readily available, and surveys have already been published on the subject, in the author's opinion a clear link with past work had not been completely clarified.

Adaptive and sequential experiment design is a well-studied area in numerous domains. We survey and synthesize the work of the online statistical learning paradigm referred to as multi-armed bandits integrating the existing research as a resource for a certain class of online experiments. We first explore the traditional stochastic model of a multi-armed bandit, then explore a taxonomic scheme of complications to that model, for each complication relating it to a specific requirement or consideration of the experiment design context. Finally, at the end of the paper, we present a table of known upper-bounds of regret for all studied algorithms providing both perspectives for future theoretical work and a decision-making tool for practitioners looking for theoretical guarantees.

Quality assurance is one the most important challenges in crowdsourcing. Assigning tasks to several workers to increase quality through redundant answers can be expensive if asking homogeneous sources. This limitation has been overlooked by current crowdsourcing platforms resulting therefore in costly solutions. In order to achieve desirable cost-quality tradeoffs it is essential to apply efficient crowd access optimization techniques. Our work argues that optimization needs to be aware of diversity and correlation of information within groups of individuals so that crowdsourcing redundancy can be adequately planned beforehand. Based on this intuitive idea, we introduce the Access Path Model (APM), a novel crowd model that leverages the notion of access paths as an alternative way of retrieving information. APM aggregates answers ensuring high quality and meaningful confidence. Moreover, we devise a greedy optimization algorithm for this model that finds a provably good approximate plan to access the crowd. We evaluate our approach on three crowdsourced datasets that illustrate various aspects of the problem. Our results show that the Access Path Model combined with greedy optimization is cost-efficient and practical to overcome common difficulties in large-scale crowdsourcing like data sparsity and anonymity.

Coordination with an unknown human teammate is a notable challenge for cooperative agents. Behavior of human players in games with cooperating AI agents is often sub-optimal and inconsistent leading to choreographed and limited cooperative scenarios in games. This paper considers the difficulty of cooperating with a teammate whose goal and corresponding behavior change periodically. Previous work uses Bayesian models for updating beliefs about cooperating agents based on observations. We describe belief models for on-line planning, discuss tuning in the presence of noisy observations, and demonstrate empirically its effectiveness in coordinating with inconsistent agents in a simple domain. Further work in this area promises to lead to techniques for more interesting cooperative AI in games.

Probabilistic graphical models, such as Bayesian networks, are intuitive and theoretically sound tools for modeling uncertainty. A major problem with applying Bayesian networks in practice is that it is hard to judge whether a model fits well a case that it is supposed to solve. One way of expressing a possible dissonance between a model and a case is the {\em surprise index}, proposed by Habbema, which expresses the degree of surprise by the evidence given the model. While this measure reflects the intuition that the probability of a case should be judged in the context of a model, it is computationally intractable. In this paper, we propose an efficient way of approximating the surprise index.

The updating is accomplished using Bayes'

How can robots fluently communicate with humans and have context-preserving conversation? It is the most momentous and crucial problem in robotics research, especially for service robots such as child-care robots. Here, we aim to develop a situated conversation system for child-care robots. The conversation system considers the current context between robots and children as well as the situation the child is in. The system consists of two parts. The first part tries to understand the context. This part uses the embedded sensors of robots to understand the context and wearable sensors of the child for getting information of the situation the child is in. The second part is to generate the situated conversation. In terms of the model, we designed a hierarchical Bayesian Network for the first part and a Hypernetwork model is used for the second part. We illustrate the application of communication with a child in a child-care service robots scenario. For this application, we collect wearable sensors’ data from the child and mother-child conversation data in daily life. Finally, we discuss our results and future works.

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) using machine learning is a fast growing area of research. Action Role Playing Game (ARPG) levels represent an interesting challenge for PCG due to their multi-tiered structure and nonlinearity. Previous work has used Bayes Nets (BN) to learn properties of the topological structure of levels from The Legend of Zelda. In this paper we describe a method for sampling these learned distributions to generate valid, playable level topologies. We carry this deeper and learn a sampleable representation of the individual rooms using Principal Component Analysis. We combine the two techniques and present a multi-scale machine learned technique for procedurally generating ARPG levels from a corpus of levels from The Legend of Zelda.

The growing need to analyze large collections of documents has led to great developments in topic modeling. Since documents are frequently associated with other related variables, such as labels or ratings, much interest has been placed on supervised topic models. However, the nature of most annotation tasks, prone to ambiguity and noise, often with high volumes of documents, deem learning under a single-annotator assumption unrealistic or unpractical for most real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a supervised topic model that accounts for the heterogeneity and biases among different annotators that are encountered in practice when learning from crowds. We develop an efficient stochastic variational inference algorithm that is able to scale to very large datasets, and we empirically demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model over state of the art approaches.

Smart decision making at the tactical level is important for Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents to perform well in the domain of real-time strategy (RTS) games. Winning battles is crucial in RTS games, and while humans can decide when and how to attack based on their experience, it is challenging for AI agents to estimate combat outcomes accurately. A few existing models address this problem in the game of StarCraft but present many restrictions, such as not modeling injured units, supporting only a small number of unit types, or being able to predict the winner of a fight but not the remaining army. Prediction using simulations is a popular method, but generally slow and requires extensive coding to model the game engine accurately. This paper introduces a model based on Lanchester's attrition laws which addresses the mentioned limitations while being faster than running simulations. Unit strength values are learned using maximum likelihood estimation from past recorded battles. We present experiments that use a StarCraft simulator for generating battles for both training and testing, and show that the model is capable of making accurate predictions. Furthermore, we implemented our method in a StarCraft bot that uses either this or traditional simulations to decide when to attack or to retreat. We present tournament results (against top bots from 2014 AIIDE competition) comparing the performances of the two versions, and show increased winning percentages for our method.