We consider the problem of active sequential hypothesis testing where a Bayesian decision maker must infer the true hypothesis from a set of hypotheses. The decision maker may choose for a set of actions, where the outcome of an action is corrupted by independent noise. In this paper we consider a special case where the decision maker has limited knowledge about the distribution of observations for each action, in that only a binary value is observed. Our objective is to infer the true hypothesis with low error, while minimizing the number of action sampled. Our main results include the derivation of a lower bound on sample size for our system under limited knowledge and the design of an active learning policy that matches this lower bound and outperforms similar known algorithms.

Neuroscience experiments often require training animals to perform tasks designed to elicit various sensory, cognitive, and motor behaviors. Training typically involves a series of gradual adjustments of stimulus conditions and rewards in order to bring about learning. However, training protocols are usually hand-designed, relying on a combination of intuition, guesswork, and trial-and-error, and often require weeks or months to achieve a desired level of task performance. Here we combine ideas from reinforcement learning and adaptive optimal experimental design to formulate methods for adaptive optimal training of animal behavior. Our work addresses two intriguing problems at once: first, it seeks to infer the learning rules underlying an animal's behavioral changes during training; second, it seeks to exploit these rules to select stimuli that will maximize the rate of learning toward a desired objective.

The task of program synthesis, or automatically generating programs that are consistent with a provided specification, remains a challenging task in artificial intelligence. As in other fields of AI, deep learning-based end-to-end approaches have made great advances in program synthesis. However, more so than other fields such as computer vision, program synthesis provides greater opportunities to explicitly exploit structured information such as execution traces, which contain a superset of the information input/output pairs. While they are highly useful for program synthesis, as execution traces are more difficult to obtain than input/output pairs, we use the insight that we can split the process into two parts: infer the trace from the input/output example, then infer the program from the trace. This simple modification leads to state-of-the-art results in program synthesis in the Karel domain, improving accuracy to 81.3% from the 77.12% of prior work.

It can reliably discover and track objects through the sequence; it can also conditionally generate future frames, thereby simulating expected motion of objects. This is achieved by explicitly encoding object numbers, locations and appearances in the latent variables of the model. SQAIR retains all strengths of its predecessor, Attend, Infer, Repeat (AIR, Eslami et.

While this approach is inspiring, its focus on modelling individual (and thereby inherently static)scenesleadstoanumber oflimitations.

Reasoning about discrete objects in an environment is foundational to how agents perceive their surroundingsandactinit.

We study interactive learning of language agents based on user edits made to the agent's output. In a typical setting such as writing assistants, the user interacts with a language agent to generate a response given a context, and may optionally edit the agent response to personalize it based on their latent preference, in addition to improving the correctness. The edit feedback is naturally generated, making it a suitable candidate for improving the agent's alignment with the user's preference, and for reducing the cost of user edits over time. We propose a learning framework, PRELUDE that infers a description of the user's latent preference based on historic edit data and using it to define a prompt policy that drives future response generation. This avoids fine-tuning the agent, which is costly, challenging to scale with the number of users, and may even degrade its performance on other tasks.

Many measurement modalities arise from well-understood physical processes and result in information-rich but difficult-to-interpret data. Much of this data still requires laborious human interpretation. This is the case in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, where the observed spectrum of a molecule provides a distinguishing fingerprint of its bond structure. Here we solve the resulting inverse problem: given a molecular formula and a spectrum, can we infer the chemical structure? We show for a wide variety of molecules we can quickly compute the correct molecular structure, and can detect with reasonable certainty when our method cannot. We treat this as a problem of graph-structured prediction, where armed with per-vertex information on a subset of the vertices, we infer the edges and edge types. We frame the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and incrementally construct molecules one bond at a time, training a deep neural network via imitation learning, where we learn to imitate a subisomorphic oracle which knows which remaining bonds are correct. Our method is fast, accurate, and is the first among recent chemical-graph generation approaches to exploit per-vertex information and generate graphs with vertex constraints. Our method points the way towards automation of molecular structure identification and potentially active learning for spectroscopy.