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In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of previously solved primitive tasks (task composition). Otherwise, prior knowledge can be used to adjust the reward function for a new problem, in a way that leaves the optimal policy unchanged but enables quicker learning (reward shaping). In this work, we develop a general framework for reward shaping and task composition in entropy-regularized RL. To do so, we derive an exact relation connecting the optimal soft value functions for two entropy-regularized RL problems with different reward functions and dynamics. We show how the derived relation leads to a general result for reward shaping in entropy-regularized RL. We then generalize this approach to derive an exact relation connecting optimal value functions for the composition of multiple tasks in entropy-regularized RL. We validate these theoretical contributions with experiments showing that reward shaping and task composition lead to faster learning in various settings.


AAAI 2023

Utilizing Prior Solutions for Reward Shaping and Composition in Entropy-Regularized Reinforcement Learning

multi-task learning ml: reinforcement learning algorithms

ml: reinforcement learning theory ml: transfer

domain adaptation

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

Several works have proven that finetuning is an applicable approach for debiasing contextualized word embeddings. Similarly, discrete prompts with semantic meanings have shown to be effective in debiasing tasks. With unfixed mathematical representation at the token level, continuous prompts usually surpass discrete ones at providing a pre-trained language model (PLM) with additional task-specific information. Despite this, relatively few efforts have been made to debias PLMs by prompt tuning with continuous prompts compared to its discrete counterpart. Furthermore, for most debiasing methods that alter a PLM's original parameters, a major problem is the need to not only decrease the bias in the PLM but also to ensure that the PLM does not lose its representation ability. Finetuning methods typically have a hard time maintaining this balance, as they tend to violently remove meanings of attribute words (like the words developing our concepts of "male" and "female" for gender), which also leads to an unstable and unpredictable training process. In this paper, we propose ADEPT, a method to debias PLMs using prompt tuning while maintaining the delicate balance between removing biases and ensuring representation ability. To achieve this, we propose a new training criterion inspired by manifold learning and equip it with an explicit debiasing term to optimize prompt tuning. In addition, we conduct several experiments with regard to the reliability, quality, and quantity of a previously proposed attribute training corpus in order to obtain a clearer prototype of a certain attribute, which indicates the attribute's position and relative distances to other words on the manifold. We evaluate ADEPT on several widely acknowledged debiasing benchmarks and downstream tasks, and find that it achieves competitive results while maintaining (and in some cases even improving) the PLM's representation ability. We further visualize words' correlation before and after debiasing a PLM, and give some possible explanations for the visible effects.

ADEPT: A DEbiasing PrompT Framework

Maintaining engagement and consistency is particularly important in dialogue systems. Existing works have improved the performance of dialogue systems by intentionally learning interlocutor personas with sophisticated network structures. One issue with this approach is that it requires more personal corpora with annotations. Additionally, these models typically perform the next utterance prediction to generate a response but neglect the discourse coherence in the entire conversation. To address these issues, this study proposes a method of learning to memorize entailment and discourse relations for persona-consistent dialogue tasks. Entailment text pairs in natural language inference dataset were applied to learn latent entailment relations as external memories by premise-to-hypothesis generation task. Furthermore, an internal memory with a similar architecture was applied to the discourse information in the dialogue. Placing orthogonality restrictions on these two memory spaces ensures that the latent entailment relations remain dialogue-independent. Both memories collaborate to obtain entailment and discourse representation for the generation, allowing a deeper understanding of both consistency and coherence. Experiments on two large public datasets, PersonaChat and DSTC7-AVSD, demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Both automatic and human evaluations indicate that the proposed model outperforms several strong baselines in terms of both persona consistency and response coherence. Our source code is availabled at https://github.com/Chenrj233/LMEDR.

Learning to Memorize Entailment and Discourse Relations for Persona-Consistent Dialogues

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is crucial in recommendation and online advertising systems. Existing methods usually model user behaviors, while ignoring the informative context which influences the user to make a click decision, e.g., click pages and pre-ranking candidates that inform inferences about user interests, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a Decision-Making Context Interaction Network (DCIN), which deploys a carefully designed Context Interaction Unit (CIU) to learn decision-making contexts and thus benefits CTR prediction. In addition, the relationship between different decision-making context sources is explored by the proposed Adaptive Interest Aggregation Unit (AIAU) to improve CTR prediction further. In the experiments on public and industrial datasets, DCIN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Notably, the model has obtained the improvement of CTR+2.9%/CPM+2.1%/GMV+1.5% for online A/B testing and served the main traffic of Meituan Waimai advertising system. 

Decision-Making Context Interaction Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Representation learning of source code is essential for applying machine learning to software engineering tasks. Learning code representation from a multilingual source code dataset has been shown to be more effective than learning from single-language datasets separately, since more training data from multilingual dataset improves the model's ability to extract language-agnostic information from source code. However, existing multilingual training overlooks the language-specific information which is crucial for modeling source code across different programming languages, while only focusing on learning a unified model with shared parameters among different languages for language-agnostic information modeling. To address this problem, we propose MetaTPTrans, a meta learning approach for multilingual code representation learning. MetaTPTrans generates different parameters for the feature extractor according to the specific programming language type of the input code snippet, enabling the model to learn both language-agnostic and language-specific information with dynamic parameters in the feature extractor. We conduct experiments on the code summarization and code completion tasks to verify the effectiveness of our approach. The results demonstrate the superiority of our approach with significant improvements on state-of-the-art baselines.

MetaTPTrans: A Meta Learning Approach for Multilingual Code Representation Learning

In recent years, many researchers have leveraged structural information from dependency trees to improve Named Entity Recognition (NER).
  Most of their methods take dependency-tree labels as input features for NER model training.
  However, such dependency information is not inherently provided in most NER corpora, making the methods with low usability in practice.  
  To effectively exploit the potential of word-dependency knowledge, motivated by the success of Multi-Task Learning on NER, we investigate a novel NER learning method incorporating cross-domain Dependency Parsing (DP) as its auxiliary learning task. 
  Then,  considering the high consistency of word-dependency relations across domains, we present an unsupervised domain-adapted method to transfer word-dependency knowledge from high-resource domains to low-resource ones.
  With the help of cross-domain DP to bridge different domains, both useful cross-domain and cross-task knowledge can be learnt by our model to considerably benefit cross-domain NER. 
  To make better use of the cross-task knowledge between NER and DP, we unify both tasks in a shared network architecture for joint learning using Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD).
  Finally, through extensive experiments, we show our proposed method can not only effectively take advantage of word-dependency knowledge, but also significantly outperform other Multi-Task Learning methods on cross-domain NER.

Domain-Adapted Dependency Parsing for Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition

The ability to understand and generate similes is an imperative step to realize human-level AI. However, there is still a considerable gap between machine intelligence and human cognition in similes, since deep models based on statistical distribution tend to favour high-frequency similes. Hence, a large-scale symbolic knowledge base of similes is required, as it contributes to the modeling of diverse yet unpopular similes while facilitating additional evaluation and reasoning. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel framework for large-scale simile knowledge base construction, as well as two probabilistic metrics which enable an improved understanding of simile phenomena in natural language. Overall, we construct MAPS-KB, a million-scale probabilistic simile knowledge base, covering 4.3 million triplets over 0.4 million terms from 70 GB corpora. We conduct sufficient experiments to justify the effectiveness and necessity of the methods of our framework. We also apply MAPS-KB on three downstream tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance, further demonstrating the value of MAPS-KB. Resources of MAPS-KB are publicly available at https://github.com/Abbey4799/MAPS-KB.

MAPS-KB: A Million-scale Probabilistic Simile Knowledge Base

Developing a dynamical model for learning in games has attracted much recent interest. In stochastic games, agents need to make decisions in multiple states, and transitions between states, in turn, influence the dynamics of strategies. While previous works typically focus either on 2-agent stochastic games or on normal form games under an infinite-agent setting, we aim at formally modelling the learning dynamics in stochastic games under the infinite-agent setting. With a novel use of pair-approximation method, we develop a formal model for myopic Q-learning in stochastic games with symmetric state transition. We verify the descriptive power of our model (a partial differential equation) across various games through comparisons with agent-based simulation results. Based on our proposed model, we can gain qualitative and quantitative insights into the influence of transition probabilities on the dynamics of strategies. In particular, we illustrate that a careful design of transition probabilities can help players overcome the social dilemmas and promote cooperation, even if agents are myopic learners.

A Pair-Approximation Method for Modelling the Dynamics of Multi-Agent Stochastic Games

Event grounding aims at linking mention references in text corpora to events from a knowledge base (KB). Previous work on this task focused primarily on linking to a single KB event, thereby overlooking the hierarchical aspects of events.
Events in documents are typically described at various levels of spatio-temporal granularity (Glavaˇs et al. 2014). These hierarchical relations are utilized in downstream tasks of narrative understanding and schema construction. In this work, we present an extension to the event grounding task that requires tackling hierarchical event structures from the KB. Our proposed task involves linking a mention reference to a set of event labels from a subevent hierarchy in the KB. We propose a retrieval methodology that leverages event hierarchy through an auxiliary hierarchical loss (Murty et al. 2018). On an automatically created multilingual dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the hierarchical loss against retrieve and re-rank baselines
(Wu et al. 2020; Pratapa, Gupta, and Mitamura 2022). Furthermore, we demonstrate the systems’ ability to aid hierarchical discovery among unseen events.

Hierarchical Event Grounding

Exploratory data analytics (EDA) is a sequential decision making process where analysts choose subsequent queries that might lead to some interesting insights based on the previous queries and corresponding results. Data processing systems often execute the queries on samples to produce results with low latency. Different downsampling strategy preserves different statistics of the data and have different magnitude of latency reductions. The optimum choice of sampling strategy often depends on the particular context of the analysis flow and the hidden intent of the analyst. In this paper, we are the first to consider the impact of sampling in interactive data exploration settings as they introduce approximation errors.
We propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based framework which can optimize the sample selection in order to keep the analysis and insight generation flow intact. Evaluations with real datasets show that our technique can preserve the original insight generation flow while improving the interaction latency, compared to baseline methods. 

Reinforced Approximate Exploratory Data Analysis

Multimodal processing has attracted much attention lately especially with the success of pre-training. However, the exploration has mainly focused on vision-language pre-training, as introducing more modalities can greatly complicate model design and optimization. In this paper, we extend the state-of-the-art Vision-Language model CLIP to accommodate the audio modality for Vision-Language-Audio multimodal processing. Specifically, we apply inter-modal and intra-modal
contrastive learning to explore the correlation between audio and other modalities in addition to the inner characteristics of the audio modality. Moreover, we further design an audio type token to dynamically learn different audio information
type for different scenarios, as both verbal and nonverbal heterogeneous information is conveyed in general audios. Our proposed CLIP4VLA model is validated in different downstream tasks including video retrieval and video captioning, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets of MSR-VTT, VATEX, and Audiocaps.

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Utilizing Prior Solutions for Reward Shaping and Composition in Entropy-Regularized Reinforcement Learning

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