Technology
Solving Zero-Sum Security Games in Discretized Spatio-Temporal Domains
Xu, Haifeng (University of Southern California) | Fang, Fei (University of Southern California) | Jiang, Albert Xin (University of Southern California) | Conitzer, Vincent (Duke University) | Dughmi, Shaddin (University of Southern California) | Tambe, Milind (University of Southern California)
Among the many deployment areas of Stackelberg Security games, a major area involves games played out in space and time, which includes applications in multiple mobile defender resources protecting multiple mobile targets. Previous algorithms for such spatio-temporal security games fail to scale-up and little is known ofthe computational complexity properties of these problems.This paper provides a novel oracle-based algorithmic framework for a systematic study of different problem variants of computing optimal (minimax) strategies in spatio-temporal security games. Our framework enables efficient computation of a minimax strategy when the problem admits a polynomial-time oracle. Furthermore,for the cases in which efficient oracles are difficultto find, we propose approximations or prove hardness results.
Semi-Supervised Matrix Completion for Cross-Lingual Text Classi๏ฌcation
Xiao, Min (Temple University) | Guo, Yuhong (Temple University)
Cross-lingual text classi๏ฌcation is the task of assigning labels to observed documents in a label-scarce target language domain by using a prediction model trained with labeled documents from a label-rich source language domain. Cross-lingual text classi๏ฌcation is popularly studied in natural language processing area to reduce the expensive manual annotation effort required in the target language domain. In this work, we propose a novel semi-supervised representation learning approach to address this challenging task by inducing interlingual features via semi-supervised matrix completion. To evaluate the proposed learning technique, we conduct extensive experiments on eighteen cross language sentiment classi๏ฌcation tasks with four different languages. The empirical results demonstrate the ef๏ฌcacy of the proposed approach, and show it outperforms a number of related cross-lingual learning methods.
Partial Multi-View Clustering
Li, Shao-Yuan (Nanjing University) | Jiang, Yuan (Nanjing University) | Zhou, Zhi-Hua (Nanjing University)
Real data are often with multiple modalities or comingfrom multiple channels, while multi-view clusteringprovides a natural formulation for generating clustersfrom such data. Previous studies assumed that each exampleappears in all views, or at least there is one viewcontaining all examples. In real tasks, however, it is oftenthe case that every view suffers from the missing ofsome data and therefore results in many partial examples,i.e., examples with some views missing. In this paper,we present possibly the first study on partial multiviewclustering. Our proposed approach, PVC, worksby establishing a latent subspace where the instancescorresponding to the same example in different viewsare close to each other, and similar instances (belongingto different examples) in the same view should bewell grouped. Experiments on two-view data demonstratethe advantages of our proposed approach.
R2: An Efficient MCMC Sampler for Probabilistic Programs
Nori, Aditya (Microsoft Research) | Hur, Chung-Kil (Seoul National University) | Rajamani, Sriram (Microsoft Research) | Samuel, Selva (Microsoft Research)
We present a new Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithm for probabilistic programs. Our approach and tool, called R2, has the unique feature of employing program analysis in order to improve the efficiencyof MCMC sampling. Given an input program P, R2 propagates observations in P backwards to obtaina semantically equivalent program P' in which every probabilistic assignment is immediately followed by an observe statement. Inference is performed by a suitably modified version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm that exploits the structure of the program P'. This has the overall effect of preventing rejections due to program executions that fail to satisfy observations in P. We formalize the semantics of probabilistic programs and rigorously prove the correctness of R2. We also empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of R2โin particular, we show that R2 is able to produce results of similar quality as the CHURCH and STAN probabilistic programming tools with much shorter execution time.
Combining Multiple Correlated Reward and Shaping Signals by Measuring Confidence
Brys, Tim (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Nowรฉ, Ann (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Kudenko, Daniel (University of York) | Taylor, Matthew E. (Washington State University)
Multi-objective problems with correlated objectives are a class of problems that deserve specific attention. In contrast to typical multi-objective problems, they do not require the identification of trade-offs between the objectives, as (near-) optimal solutions for any objective are (near-) optimal for every objective. Intelligently combining the feedback from these objectives, instead of only looking at a single one, can improve optimization. This class of problems is very relevant in reinforcement learning, as any single-objective reinforcement learning problem can be framed as such a multi-objective problem using multiple reward shaping functions. After discussing this problem class, we propose a solution technique for such reinforcement learning problems, called adaptive objective selection. This technique makes a temporal difference learner estimate the Q-function for each objective in parallel, and introduces a way of measuring confidence in these estimates. This confidence metric is then used to choose which objective's estimates to use for action selection. We show significant improvements in performance over other plausible techniques on two problem domains. Finally, we provide an intuitive analysis of the technique's decisions, yielding insights into the nature of the problems being solved.
Fast Algorithm for Non-Stationary Gaussian Process Prediction
Zhang, Yulai (Tsinghua University) | Luo, Guiming (Tsinghua University)
Algorithm's time complexity is an essential issue for time series prediction in numerous practices.A novel fast exact inference method for Gaussian process model is proposed in this paper to accelerate the task of non-stationary time series prediction. Experiment was done on the real world power load data.
Non-Convex Feature Learning via Lp,inf Operator
Kong, Deguang (University of Texas Arlington) | Ding, Chris (University of Texas Arlington)
We present a feature selection method for solving sparse regularization problem, which hasa composite regularization of $\ell_p$ norm and $\ell_{\infty}$ norm.We use proximal gradient method to solve this \L1inf operator problem, where a simple but efficient algorithm is designed to minimize a relatively simple objective function, which contains a vector of $\ell_2$ norm and $\ell_\infty$ norm. Proposed method brings some insight for solving sparsity-favoring norm, andextensive experiments are conducted to characterize the effect of varying $p$ and to compare with other approaches on real world multi-class and multi-label datasets.
Adaptive Multi-Compositionality for Recursive Neural Models with Applications to Sentiment Analysis
Dong, Li (Beihang University) | Wei, Furu (Microsoft Research) | Zhou, Ming (Microsoft Research) | Xu, Ke (Beihang University)
Recursive neural models have achieved promising results in many natural language processing tasks. The main difference among these models lies in the composition function, i.e., how to obtain the vector representation for a phrase or sentence using the representations of words it contains. This paper introduces a novel Adaptive Multi-Compositionality (AdaMC) layer to recursive neural models. The basic idea is to use more than one composition functions and adaptively select them depending on the input vectors. We present a general framework to model each semantic composition as a distribution over these composition functions. The composition functions and parameters used for adaptive selection are learned jointly from data. We integrate AdaMC into existing recursive neural models and conduct extensive experiments on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank. The results illustrate that AdaMC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art sentiment classification methods. It helps push the best accuracy of sentence-level negative/positive classification from 85.4% up to 88.5%.
Learning to Recognize Novel Objects in One Shot through Human-Robot Interactions in Natural Language Dialogues
Krause, Evan A. (Tufts University) | Zillich, Michael (Technical University Vienna) | Williams, Thomas (Tufts University) | Scheutz, Matthias (Tufts University)
Being able to quickly and naturally teach robots new knowledge is critical for many future open-world human-robot interaction scenarios. In this paper we present a novel approach to using natural language context for one-shot learning of visual objects, where the robot is immediately able to recognize the described object. We describe the architectural components and demonstrate the proposed approach on a robotic platform in a proof-of-concept evaluation.
Online Classification Using a Voted RDA Method
Xu, Tianbing (Facebook) | Gao, Jianfeng (Microsoft Research) | Xiao, Lin (Microsoft Research) | Regan, Amelia C. (University of Califorina, Irvine)
We propose a voted dual averaging method for on- line classification problems with explicit regularization. This method employs the update rule of the regularized dual averaging (RDA) method proposed by Xiao, but only on the subsequence of training examples where a classification error is made. We derive a bound on the number of mistakes made by this method on the training set, as well as its generalization error rate. We also intro- duce the concept of relative strength of regularization, and show how it affects the mistake bound and gener- alization performance. We examine the method using l1-regularization on a large-scale natural language pro- cessing task, and obtained state-of-the-art classification performance with fairly sparse models.