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Inverse Reinforcement Learning from a Gradient-based Learner

Neural Information Processing Systems

Inverse Reinforcement Learning addresses the problem of inferring an expert's reward function from demonstrations. However, in many applications, we not only have access to the expert's near-optimal behaviour, but we also observe part of her learning process. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for this setting, in which the goal is to recover the reward function being optimized by an agent, given a sequence of policies produced during learning. Our approach is based on the assumption that the observed agent is updating her policy parameters along the gradient direction. Then we extend our method to deal with the more realistic scenario where we only have access to a dataset of learning trajectories. For both settings, we provide theoretical insights into our algorithms' performance. Finally, we evaluate the approach in a simulated GridWorld environment and on the MuJoCo environments, comparing it with the state-of-the-art baseline.


Dynamic Fusion of Eye Movement Data and Verbal Narrations in Knowledge-rich Domains

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose to jointly analyze experts' eye movements and verbal narrations to discover important and interpretable knowledge patterns to better understand their decision-making processes. The discovered patterns can further enhance data-driven statistical models by fusing experts' domain knowledge to support complex human-machine collaborative decision-making. Our key contribution is a novel dynamic Bayesian nonparametric model that assigns latent knowledge patterns into key phases involved in complex decision-making. Each phase is characterized by a unique distribution of word topics discovered from verbal narrations and their dynamic interactions with eye movement patterns, indicating experts' special perceptual behavior within a given decision-making stage. A new split-merge-switch sampler is developed to efficiently explore the posterior state space with an improved mixing rate. Case studies on diagnostic error prediction and disease morphology categorization help demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and discovered knowledge patterns.


2bba9f4124283edd644799e0cecd45ca-AuthorFeedback.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

We thank all the reviewers for their constructive feedback. We address the key questions and concerns below. This is shown in Eq. 1 below. Therefore, this is not a valid counterexample to ρ -projection's handling of other forms of policy invariance. The ESOR values in Table 1 shows the number of iterations taken to reach expert's ESOR. However, they differ in the type of query used.


2bba9f4124283edd644799e0cecd45ca-AuthorFeedback.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

We thank all the reviewers for their constructive feedback. We address the key questions and concerns below. This is shown in Eq. 1 below. Therefore, this is not a valid counterexample to ρ -projection's handling of other forms of policy invariance. The ESOR values in Table 1 shows the number of iterations taken to reach expert's ESOR. However, they differ in the type of query used.


BAM! Just Like That: Simple and Efficient Parameter Upcycling for Mixture of Experts

Neural Information Processing Systems

Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework has become a popular architecture for large language models due to its superior performance compared to dense models. However, training MoEs from scratch in a large-scale regime is prohibitively expensive. We propose BAM (Branch-Attend-Mix), a simple yet effective improvement to MoE training. BAM makes full use of specialized dense models by not only using their feed-forward network (FFN) to initialize the MoE layers but also leveraging experts' attention weights fully by leveraging them as mixture-of-attention (MoA) layers. We explore two methods for upcycling MoA layers: 1) initializing separate attention experts from dense models including key, value, and query matrices; and 2) initializing only Q projections while sharing key-value pairs across all experts to facilitate efficient inference. Our experiments using seed models ranging from 590 million to 2 billion parameters show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under the same data and compute budget in both perplexity and downstream tasks evaluations, confirming the effectiveness of BAM.


MomentumSMoE: Integrating Momentum into Sparse Mixture of Experts

Neural Information Processing Systems

Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) has become the key to unlocking unparalleled scalability in deep learning. SMoE has the potential to exponentially increase in parameter count while maintaining the efficiency of the model by only activating a small subset of these parameters for a given sample. However, it has been observed that SMoE suffers from unstable training and has difficulty adapting to new distributions, leading to the model's lack of robustness to data contamination. To overcome these limitations, we first establish a connection between the dynamics of the expert representations in SMoEs and gradient descent on a multi-objective optimization problem. Leveraging our framework, we then integrate momentum into SMoE and propose a new family of SMoEs, named MomentumSMoE.


Variational Distillation of Diffusion Policies into Mixture of Experts

Neural Information Processing Systems

This work introduces Variational Diffusion Distillation (VDD), a novel method that distills denoising diffusion policies into Mixtures of Experts (MoE) through variational inference. Diffusion Models are the current state-of-the-art in generative modeling due to their exceptional ability to accurately learn and represent complex, multi-modal distributions. This ability allows Diffusion Models to replicate the inherent diversity in human behavior, making them the preferred models in behavior learning such as Learning from Human Demonstrations (LfD).However, diffusion models come with some drawbacks, including the intractability of likelihoods and long inference times due to their iterative sampling process. The inference times, in particular, pose a significant challenge to real-time applications such as robot control.In contrast, MoEs effectively address the aforementioned issues while retaining the ability to represent complex distributions but are notoriously difficult to train.VDD is the first method that distills pre-trained diffusion models into MoE models, and hence, combines the expressiveness of Diffusion Models with the benefits of Mixture Models.Specifically, VDD leverages a decompositional upper bound of the variational objective that allows the training of each expert separately, resulting in a robust optimization scheme for MoEs.VDD demonstrates across nine complex behavior learning tasks, that it is able to: i) accurately distill complex distributions learned by the diffusion model, ii) outperform existing state-of-the-art distillation methods, and iii) surpass conventional methods for training MoE. The code and videos are available at https://intuitive-robots.github.io/vdd-website.


MoE Jetpack: From Dense Checkpoints to Adaptive Mixture of Experts for Vision Tasks

Neural Information Processing Systems

The sparsely activated mixture of experts (MoE) model presents an effective alternative to densely activated (dense) models, combining improved accuracy with computational efficiency. However, training MoE models from scratch requires extensive data and computational resources, a challenge that limits their widespread adoption. To address this, we introduce MoE Jetpack, a framework designed to fine-tune the abundant and easily accessible dense checkpoints into MoE models. MoE Jetpack incorporates two key techniques: (1) checkpoint recycling, which initializes MoE models with dense checkpoints to accelerate convergence and enhance accuracy, minimizing the need for extensive pre-training; (2) the hyperspherical adaptive MoE (SpheroMoE) layer, which optimizes the MoE architecture to enhance fine-tuning performance and efficiency.Experimental results indicate that MoE Jetpack doubles the convergence speed and enhances accuracy by 2.8% on ImageNet-1K.


Adaptive Selective Sampling for Online Prediction with Experts

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider online prediction of a binary sequence with expert advice. For this setting, we devise label-efficient forecasting algorithms, which use a selective sampling scheme that enables collecting much fewer labels than standard procedures. For the general case without a perfect expert, we prove best-of-both-worlds guarantees, demonstrating that the proposed forecasting algorithm always queries sufficiently many labels in the worst case to obtain optimal regret guarantees, while simultaneously querying much fewer labels in more benign settings. Specifically, for a scenario where one expert is strictly better than the others in expectation, we show that the label complexity of the label-efficient forecaster is roughly upper-bounded by the square root of the number of rounds. Finally, we present numerical experiments empirically showing that the normalized regret of the label-efficient forecaster can asymptotically match known minimax rates for pool-based active learning, suggesting it can optimally adapt to benign settings.


Mixtures of Experts for Audio-Visual Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the rapid development of multimedia technology, audio-visual learning has emerged as a promising research topic within the field of multimodal analysis. In this paper, we explore parameter-efficient transfer learning for audio-visual learning and propose the Audio-Visual Mixture of Experts (\ourmethodname) to inject adapters into pre-trained models flexibly. Specifically, we introduce unimodal and cross-modal adapters as multiple experts to specialize in intra-modal and inter-modal information, respectively, and employ a lightweight router to dynamically allocate the weights of each expert according to the specific demands of each task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach \ourmethodname achieves superior performance across multiple audio-visual tasks, including AVE, AVVP, AVS, and AVQA.