We introduce a novel repeated Inverse Reinforcement Learning problem: the agent has to act on behalf of a human in a sequence of tasks and wishes to minimize the number of tasks that it surprises the human by acting suboptimally with respect to how the human would have acted. Each time the human is surprised, the agent is provided a demonstration of the desired behavior by the human. We formalize this problem, including how the sequence of tasks is chosen, in a few different ways and provide some foundational results.

From just a glance, humans can make rich predictions about the future of a wide range of physical systems. On the other hand, modern approaches from engineering, robotics, and graphics are often restricted to narrow domains or require information about the underlying state. We introduce the Visual Interaction Network, a general-purpose model for learning the dynamics of a physical system from raw visual observations. Our model consists of a perceptual front-end based on convolutional neural networks and a dynamics predictor based on interaction networks. Through joint training, the perceptual front-end learns to parse a dynamic visual scene into a set of factored latent object representations. The dynamics predictor learns to roll these states forward in time by computing their interactions, producing a predicted physical trajectory of arbitrary length. We found that from just six input video frames the Visual Interaction Network can generate accurate future trajectories of hundreds of time steps on a wide range of physical systems. Our model can also be applied to scenes with invisible objects, inferring their future states from their effects on the visible objects, and can implicitly infer the unknown mass of objects. This work opens new opportunities for model-based decision-making and planning from raw sensory observations in complex physical environments.

Learning meaningful representations that maintain the content necessary for a particular task while filtering away detrimental variations is a problem of great interest in machine learning. In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning representations invariant to a specific factor or trait of data. The representation learning process is formulated as an adversarial minimax game. We analyze the optimal equilibrium of such a game and find that it amounts to maximizing the uncertainty of inferring the detrimental factor given the representation while maximizing the certainty of making task-specific predictions. On three benchmark tasks, namely fair and bias-free classification, language-independent generation, and lighting-independent image classification, we show that the proposed framework induces an invariant representation, and leads to better generalization evidenced by the improved performance.

In this paper, we suggest a novel data-driven approach to active learning (AL). The key idea is to train a regressor that predicts the expected error reduction for a candidate sample in a particular learning state. By formulating the query selection procedure as a regression problem we are not restricted to working with existing AL heuristics; instead, we learn strategies based on experience from previous AL outcomes. We show that a strategy can be learnt either from simple synthetic 2D datasets or from a subset of domain-specific data. Our method yields strategies that work well on real data from a wide range of domains.

You can now buy a humanoid robot housekeeper for less than the price of a second-hand car. But before splashing out, there's something you need to know Science fiction is strewn with humanoid robots, from bad-tempered Bender in to cunning Ava in . And it has long seemed like that's the natural home for such robots - on the screen and in books. The idea of a walking, talking, functioning robot with two arms and two legs has appeared to be a distant dream. Last year, machines ran, boxed and even played football at China's World Humanoid Robot Games, albeit sometimes falling over in the process . Meanwhile, companies have been readying their own range of humanoids that promise to do something a bit more useful: help around the house .

After AI Pro and Ultra subscribers first got to first try the feature, now anyone in the US can enable it. Gemini's Personal Intelligence feature is now rolling out to more users in the US. At the start of the year, Google introduced Personal Intelligence, a Gemini feature that allows the chatbot to pull information from the user's other Google apps and services to generate personalized responses. After making the feature first available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, the company is expanding availability to more users in the US. Google is kicking off the expansion with AI Mode.

Learning cooperative policies for multi-agent systems is often challenged by partial observability and a lack of coordination. In some settings, the structure of a problem allows a distributed solution with limited communication. Here, we consider a scenario where no communication is available, and instead we learn local policies for all agents that collectively mimic the solution to a centralized multi-agent static optimization problem. Our main contribution is an information theoretic framework based on rate distortion theory which facilitates analysis of how well the resulting fully decentralized policies are able to reconstruct the optimal solution. Moreover, this framework provides a natural extension that addresses which nodes an agent should communicate with to improve the performance of its individual policy.

We propose a rank-k variant of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve convex optimization over a trace-norm ball. Our algorithm replaces the top singular-vector computation (1-SVD) in Frank-Wolfe with a top-k singular-vector computation (k-SVD), which can be done by repeatedly applying 1-SVD k times. Alternatively, our algorithm can be viewed as a rank-k restricted version of projected gradient descent. We show that our algorithm has a linear convergence rate when the objective function is smooth and strongly convex, and the optimal solution has rank at most k. This improves the convergence rate and the total time complexity of the Frank-Wolfe method and its variants.

Understanding why a model makes a certain prediction can be as crucial as the prediction's accuracy in many applications. However, the highest accuracy for large modern datasets is often achieved by complex models that even experts struggle to interpret, such as ensemble or deep learning models, creating a tension between accuracy and interpretability. In response, various methods have recently been proposed to help users interpret the predictions of complex models, but it is often unclear how these methods are related and when one method is preferable over another. To address this problem, we present a unified framework for interpreting predictions, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). SHAP assigns each feature an importance value for a particular prediction. Its novel components include: (1) the identification of a new class of additive feature importance measures, and (2) theoretical results showing there is a unique solution in this class with a set of desirable properties. The new class unifies six existing methods, notable because several recent methods in the class lack the proposed desirable properties. Based on insights from this unification, we present new methods that show improved computational performance and/or better consistency with human intuition than previous approaches.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) excel at creating realistic images with complex models for which maximum likelihood is infeasible. However, the convergence of GAN training has still not been proved. We propose a two time-scale update rule (TTUR) for training GANs with stochastic gradient descent on arbitrary GAN loss functions. TTUR has an individual learning rate for both the discriminator and the generator. Using the theory of stochastic approximation, we prove that the TTUR converges under mild assumptions to a stationary local Nash equilibrium. The convergence carries over to the popular Adam optimization, for which we prove that it follows the dynamics of a heavy ball with friction and thus prefers flat minima in the objective landscape. For the evaluation of the performance of GANs at image generation, we introduce the `Fréchet Inception Distance'' (FID) which captures the similarity of generated images to real ones better than the Inception Score. In experiments, TTUR improves learning for DCGANs and Improved Wasserstein GANs (WGAN-GP) outperforming conventional GAN training on CelebA, CIFAR-10, SVHN, LSUN Bedrooms, and the One Billion Word Benchmark.