Machine Learning
Cleaning tasks knowledge transfer between heterogeneous robots: a deep learning approach (1903.05635v1)
Jaeseok Kim, Nino Cauli, Pedro Vicente, Bruno Damas, Alexandre Bernardino, José Santos-Victor, Filippo Cavallo
2019-03-13
Nowadays, autonomous service robots are becoming an important topic in robotic research. Differently from typical industrial scenarios, with highly controlled environments, service robots must show an additional robustness to task perturbations and changes in the characteristics of their sensory feedback. In this paper a robot is taught to perform two different cleaning tasks over a table, using a learning from demonstration paradigm. However, differently from other approaches, a convolutional neural network is used to generalize the demonstrations to different, not yet seen dirt or stain patterns on the same table using only visual feedback, and to perform cleaning movements accordingly. Robustness to robot posture and illumination changes is achieved using data augmentation techniques and camera images transformation. This robustness allows the transfer of knowledge regarding execution of cleaning tasks between heterogeneous robots operating in different environmental settings. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach, a network trained in Lisbon to perform cleaning tasks, using the iCub robot, is successfully employed by the DoRo robot in Peccioli, Italy.
ST-UNet: A Spatio-Temporal U-Network for Graph-structured Time Series Modeling (1903.05631v1)
Bing Yu, Haoteng Yin, Zhanxing Zhu
2019-03-13
The spatio-temporal graph learning is becoming an increasingly important object of graph study. Many application domains involve highly dynamic graphs where temporal information is crucial, e.g. traffic networks and financial transaction graphs. Despite the constant progress made on learning structured data, there is still a lack of effective means to extract dynamic complex features from spatio-temporal structures. Particularly, conventional models such as convolutional networks or recurrent neural networks are incapable of revealing the temporal patterns in short or long terms and exploring the spatial properties in local or global scope from spatio-temporal graphs simultaneously. To tackle this problem, we design a novel multi-scale architecture, Spatio-Temporal U-Net (ST-UNet), for graph-structured time series modeling. In this U-shaped network, a paired sampling operation is proposed in spacetime domain accordingly: the pooling (ST-Pool) coarsens the input graph in spatial from its deterministic partition while abstracts multi-resolution temporal dependencies through dilated recurrent skip connections; based on previous settings in the downsampling, the unpooling (ST-Unpool) restores the original structure of spatio-temporal graphs and resumes regular intervals within graph sequences. Experiments on spatio-temporal prediction tasks demonstrate that our model effectively captures comprehensive features in multiple scales and achieves substantial improvements over mainstream methods on several real-world datasets.
GASC: Genre-Aware Semantic Change for Ancient Greek (1903.05587v1)
Valerio Perrone, Marco Palma, Simon Hengchen, Alessandro Vatri, Jim Q. Smith, Barbara McGillivray
2019-03-13
Word meaning changes over time, depending on linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Associating a word's correct meaning in its historical context is a critical challenge in diachronic research, and is relevant to a range of NLP tasks, including information retrieval and semantic search in historical texts. Bayesian models for semantic change have emerged as a powerful tool to address this challenge, providing explicit and interpretable representations of semantic change phenomena. However, while corpora typically come with rich metadata, existing models are limited by their inability to exploit contextual information (such as text genre) beyond the document time-stamp. This is particularly critical in the case of ancient languages, where lack of data and long diachronic span make it harder to draw a clear distinction between polysemy and semantic change, and current systems perform poorly on these languages. We develop GASC, a dynamic semantic change model that leverages categorical metadata about the texts' genre information to boost inference and uncover the evolution of meanings in Ancient Greek corpora. In a new evaluation framework, we show that our model achieves improved predictive performance compared to the state of the art.
Single Deep Counterfactual Regret Minimization (1901.07621v3)
Eric Steinberger
2019-01-22
Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) is the most successful algorithm for finding approximate Nash equilibria in imperfect information games. However, CFR's reliance on full game-tree traversals limits its scalability. For this reason, the game's state- and action-space is often abstracted (i.e. simplified) for CFR, and the resulting strategy is then translated back to the full game, which requires extensive expert-knowledge and often converges to highly exploitable policies. A recently proposed method, Deep CFR, applies deep learning directly to CFR, allowing the agent to intrinsically abstract and generalize over the state-space from samples, without requiring expert knowledge. In this paper, we introduce Single Deep CFR (SD-CFR), a simplified variant of Deep CFR that has a lower overall approximation error by avoiding the training of an average strategy network. We show that SD-CFR is more attractive from a theoretical perspective and empirically outperforms Deep CFR with respect to exploitability and one-on-one play in poker.
Computing Approximate Equilibria in Sequential Adversarial Games by Exploitability Descent (1903.05614v1)
Edward Lockhart, Marc Lanctot, Julien Pérolat, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Dustin Morrill, Finbarr Timbers, Karl Tuyls
2019-03-13
In this paper, we present exploitability descent, a new algorithm to compute approximate equilibria in two-player zero-sum extensive-form games with imperfect information, by direct policy optimization against worst-case opponents. We prove that when following this optimization, the exploitability of a player's strategy converges asymptotically to zero, and hence when both players employ this optimization, the joint policies converge to a Nash equilibrium. Unlike fictitious play (XFP) and counterfactual regret minimization (CFR), our convergence result pertains to the policies being optimized rather than the average policies. Our experiments demonstrate convergence rates comparable to XFP and CFR in four benchmark games in the tabular case. Using function approximation, we find that our algorithm outperforms the tabular version in two of the games, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first such result in imperfect information games among this class of algorithms.
Gaussian Process Optimization with Adaptive Sketching: Scalable and No Regret (1903.05594v1)
Daniele Calandriello, Luigi Carratino, Alessandro Lazaric, Michal Valko, Lorenzo Rosasco
2019-03-13
Gaussian processes (GP) are a popular Bayesian approach for the optimization of black-box functions. Despite their effectiveness in simple problems, GP-based algorithms hardly scale to complex high-dimensional functions, as their per-iteration time and space cost is at least quadratic in the number of dimensions
and iterations
. Given a set of
alternative to choose from, the overall runtime
quickly becomes prohibitive. In this paper, we introduce BKB (budgeted kernelized bandit), a novel approximate GP algorithm for optimization under bandit feedback that achieves near-optimal regret (and hence near-optimal convergence rate) with near-constant per-iteration complexity and no assumption on the input space or covariance of the GP. Combining a kernelized linear bandit algorithm (GP-UCB) with randomized matrix sketching technique (i.e., leverage score sampling), we prove that selecting inducing points based on their posterior variance gives an accurate low-rank approximation of the GP, preserving variance estimates and confidence intervals. As a consequence, BKB does not suffer from variance starvation, an important problem faced by many previous sparse GP approximations. Moreover, we show that our procedure selects at most
points, where
is the effective dimension of the explored space, which is typically much smaller than both
runtime and
space complexity.
Safe Policy Search with Gaussian Process Models (1712.05556v2)
Kyriakos Polymenakos, Alessandro Abate, Stephen Roberts
2017-12-15
We propose a method to optimise the parameters of a policy which will be used to safely perform a given task in a data-efficient manner. We train a Gaussian process model to capture the system dynamics, based on the PILCO framework. Our model has useful analytic properties, which allow closed form computation of error gradients and estimating the probability of violating given state space constraints. During training, as well as operation, only policies that are deemed safe are implemented on the real system, minimising the risk of failure.
Benchmarking Natural Language Understanding Services for building Conversational Agents (1903.05566v1)
Xingkun Liu, Arash Eshghi, Pawel Swietojanski, Verena Rieser
2019-03-13
We have recently seen the emergence of several publicly available Natural Language Understanding (NLU) toolkits, which map user utterances to structured, but more abstract, Dialogue Act (DA) or Intent specifications, while making this process accessible to the lay developer. In this paper, we present the first wide coverage evaluation and comparison of some of the most popular NLU services, on a large, multi-domain (21 domains) dataset of 25K user utterances that we have collected and annotated with Intent and Entity Type specifications and which will be released as part of this submission. The results show that on Intent classification Watson significantly outperforms the other platforms, namely, Dialogflow, LUIS and Rasa; though these also perform well. Interestingly, on Entity Type recognition, Watson performs significantly worse due to its low Precision. Again, Dialogflow, LUIS and Rasa perform well on this task.
Effective reinforcement learning based local search for the maximum k-plex problem (1903.05537v1)
Yan Jin, John H. Drake, Una Benlic, Kun He
2019-03-13
The maximum k-plex problem is a computationally complex problem, which emerged from graph-theoretic social network studies. This paper presents an effective hybrid local search for solving the maximum k-plex problem that combines the recently proposed breakout local search algorithm with a reinforcement learning strategy. The proposed approach includes distinguishing features such as: a unified neighborhood search based on the swapping operator, a distance-and-quality reward for actions and a new parameter control mechanism based on reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments for the maximum k-plex problem (k = 2, 3, 4, 5) on 80 benchmark instances from the second DIMACS Challenge demonstrate that the proposed approach can match the best-known results from the literature in all but four problem instances. In addition, the proposed algorithm is able to find 32 new best solutions.
Predicting class-imbalanced business risk using resampling, regularization, and model ensembling algorithms (1903.05535v1)
Yan Wang, Xuelei Sherry Ni
2019-03-13
We aim at developing and improving the imbalanced business risk modeling via jointly using proper evaluation criteria, resampling, cross-validation, classifier regularization, and ensembling techniques. Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC of ROC) is used for model comparison based on 10-fold cross validation. Two undersampling strategies including random undersampling (RUS) and cluster centroid undersampling (CCUS), as well as two oversampling methods including random oversampling (ROS) and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), are applied. Three highly interpretable classifiers, including logistic regression without regularization (LR), L1-regularized LR (L1LR), and decision tree (DT) are implemented. Two ensembling techniques, including Bagging and Boosting, are applied on the DT classifier for further model improvement. The results show that, Boosting on DT by using the oversampled data containing 50% positives via SMOTE is the optimal model and it can achieve AUC, recall, and F1 score valued 0.8633, 0.9260, and 0.8907, respectively.