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This paper proposes a new sequential model learning architecture to solve partially observable Markov decision problems. Rather than compressing sequential information at every timestep as in conventional recurrent neural network-based methods, the proposed architecture generates a latent variable in each data block with a length of multiple timesteps and passes the most relevant information to the next block for policy optimization. The proposed blockwise sequential model is implemented based on self-attention, making the model capable of detailed sequential learning in partial observable settings. The proposed model builds an additional learning network to efficiently implement gradient estimation by using self-normalized importance sampling, which does not require the complex blockwise input data reconstruction in the model learning. Numerical results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms previous methods in various partially observable environments.

AAAI 2022

Blockwise Sequential Model Learning for Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

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AAMAS 2020

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Self-supervised learning (SSL), especially contrastive methods, has raised attraction recently as it learns effective transferable representations without semantic annotations. A common practice for self-supervised pre-training is to use as much data as possible. For a specific downstream task, however, 
 involving irrelevant data in pre-training may degenerate the downstream performance, observed from our extensive experiments. On the other hand, for existing SSL methods, it is burdensome and infeasible to use different downstream-task-customized datasets in pre-training for different tasks.
 To address this issue, we propose a novel SSL paradigm called Scalable Dynamic Routing (SDR), which can be trained once and deployed efficiently to different downstream tasks with task-customized pre-trained models. Specifically, we construct the SDRnet with various sub-nets and train each sub-net with only one subset of the data by data-aware progressive training. When a downstream task arrives, we route among all the pre-trained sub-nets to get the best along with its corresponding weights. Experiment results show that our SDR can train 256 sub-nets on ImageNet simultaneously, which provides better transfer performance than a unified model trained on the full ImageNet, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) averaged accuracy over 11 downstream classification tasks and AP on PASCAL VOC detection task.

Task-Customized Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Scalable Dynamic Routing

Advantage Learning (AL) seeks to increase the action gap between the optimal action and its competitors, so as to improve the robustness to estimation errors. However, the method becomes problematic when the optimal action induced by the approximated value function does not agree with the true optimal action. In this paper, we present a novel method, named clipped Advantage Learning (clipped AL), to address this issue. The method is inspired by our observation that increasing the action gap blindly for all given samples while not taking their necessities into account could accumulate more errors in the performance loss bound, leading to a slow value convergence, and to avoid that, we should adjust the advantage value adaptively. We show that our simple clipped AL operator not only enjoys fast convergence guarantee but also retains proper action gaps, hence achieving a good balance between the large action gap and the fast convergence. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified empirically on several RL benchmarks with promising performance.

Robust Action Gap Increasing with Clipped Advantage Learning

We consider Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems where an agent attempts to maximize a reward signal while minimizing a cost function that models unsafe behaviors. Such formalization is addressed in the literature using constrained optimization on the cost, limiting the exploration and leading to a significant trade-off between cost and reward. In contrast, we propose a Safety-Oriented Search that complements Deep RL algorithms to bias the policy toward safety within an evolutionary cost optimization. We leverage evolutionary exploration benefits to design a novel concept of safe mutations that use visited unsafe states to explore safer actions. We further characterize the behaviors of the policies over desired specifics with a sample-based bound estimation, which makes prior verification analysis tractable in the training loop. Hence, driving the learning process towards safer regions of the policy space. Empirical evidence on the Safety Gym benchmark shows that we successfully avoid drawbacks on the return while improving the safety of the policy.

Exploring Safer Behaviors for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Random forests have long been considered as powerful model ensembles in machine learning. By training multiple decision trees, whose diversity is fostered through data and feature subsampling, the resulting random forest can lead to more stable and reliable predictions than a single decision tree. This however comes at the cost of decreased interpretability: while decision trees are often easily interpretable, the predictions made by random forests are much more difficult to understand, as they involve a majority vote over multiple decision trees. In this paper, we examine different types of reasons that explain "why" an input instance is classified as positive or negative by a Boolean random forest. Notably, as an alternative to prime-implicant explanations taking the form of subset-minimal implicants of the random forest, we introduce majoritary reasons which are subset-minimal implicants of a strict majority of decision trees. For these abductive explanations, the tractability of the generation problem (finding one reason) and the optimization problem (finding one minimum-sized reason) are investigated. Unlike prime-implicant explanations, majoritary reasons may contain redundant features. However, in practice, prime-implicant explanations - for which the identification problem is DP-complete - are slightly larger than majoritary reasons that can be generated using a simple linear-time greedy algorithm. They are also significantly larger than minimum-sized majoritary reasons which can be approached using an anytime Partial MaxSAT algorithm.

Trading Complexity for Sparsity in Random Forest Explanations

We study the convergence rate of gradient-based local search methods for solving low-rank matrix recovery problems with general objectives in both symmetric and asymmetric cases, under the assumption of the restricted isometry property. First, we develop a new technique to verify the Polyak-Lojasiewicz inequality in a neighborhood of the global minimizers, which leads to a local linear convergence region for the gradient descent method. Second, based on the local convergence result and a sharp strict saddle property proven in this paper, we present two new conditions that guarantee the global linear convergence of the perturbed gradient descent method. The developed local and global convergence results provide much stronger theoretical guarantees than the existing results. As a by-product, this work significantly improves the existing bounds on the RIP constant required to guarantee the non-existence of spurious solutions.

Local and Global Linear Convergence of General Low-Rank Matrix Recovery Problems

Recovering detailed facial geometry from a set of calibrated multi-view images is valuable for its wide range of applications. Traditional multi-view stereo (MVS) methods adopt an optimization-based scheme to regularize the matching cost. Recently, learning-based methods integrate all these into an end-to-end neural network and show superiority of efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture to recover extremely detailed 3D faces within dozens of seconds.  Unlike previous learning-based methods that regularize the cost volume via 3D CNN, we propose to learn an implicit function for regressing the matching cost.  By fitting a 3D morphable model from multi-view images, the features of multiple images are extracted and aggregated in the mesh-attached UV space, which makes the implicit function more effective in recovering detailed facial shape. Our method outperforms SOTA learning-based MVS in accuracy by a large margin on the FaceScape dataset. The code and data are released in https://github.com/zhuhao-nju/mvfr.

Detailed Facial Geometry Recovery from Multi-View Images by Learning an Implicit Function

In many real-world problems, first-order (FO) derivative evaluations are too expensive or even inaccessible. For solving these problems, zeroth-order (ZO) methods that only need function evaluations are often more efficient than FO methods or sometimes the only options. In this paper, we propose a novel zeroth-order inexact augmented Lagrangian method (ZO-iALM) to solve black-box optimization problems, which involve a composite (i.e., smooth+nonsmooth) objective and functional constraints. This appears to be the first work that develops an iALM-based ZO method for functional constrained optimization and meanwhile achieves query complexity results matching the best-known FO complexity results up to a factor of variable dimension. With an extensive experimental study, we show the effectiveness of our method. The applications of our method span from classical optimization problems to practical machine learning examples such as resource allocation in sensor networks and adversarial example generation.

Zeroth-Order Optimization for Composite Problems with Functional Constraints

We consider applications involving a large set of instances of projecting points to polytopes. We develop an intuition guided by theoretical and empirical analysis to show that when these instances follow certain structures, a large majority of the projections lie on vertices of the polytopes. To do these projections efficiently we derive a vertex-oriented incremental algorithm to project a point onto any arbitrary polytope, as well as give specific algorithms to cater to simplex projection and polytopes where the unit box is cut by planes. Such settings are especially useful in web-scale applications such as optimal matching or allocation problems. Several such problems in internet marketplaces (e-commerce, ride-sharing, food delivery, professional services, advertising, etc.), can be formulated as Linear Programs (LP) with such polytope constraints that require a projection step in the overall optimization process. We show that in some of the very recent works, the polytopic projection is the most expensive step and our efficient projection algorithms help in gaining massive improvements in performance.

Efficient Vertex-Oriented Polytopic Projection for Web-Scale Applications

Federated learning (FL) is a training technique that enables client devices to jointly learn a shared model by aggregating locally computed models without exposing their raw data. While most of the existing work focuses on improving the FL model accuracy, in this paper, we focus on the improving the training efficiency, which is often a hurdle for adopting FL in real world applications. Specifically, we design an efficient FL framework which jointly optimizes model accuracy, processing latency and communication efficiency, all of which are primary design considerations for real implementation of FL. Inspired by the recent success of Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) in solving complex control problems, we present FedMarl, a federated learning framework that relies on trained MARL agents to perform efficient run-time client selection. Experiments show that FedMarl can significantly improve model accuracy with much lower processing latency and communication cost.

Learning Advanced Client Selection Strategy for Federated Learning

Recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have led to remarkable achievements in face image synthesis. While methods that use style-based GANs can generate strikingly photorealistic face images, it is often difficult to control the characteristics of the generated faces in a meaningful and disentangled way. Prior approaches aim to achieve such semantic control and disentanglement within the latent space of a previously trained GAN. In contrast, we propose a framework that a priori models physical attributes of the face such as 3D shape, albedo, pose, and lighting explicitly, thus providing disentanglement by design. Our method, MOST-GAN, integrates the expressive power and photorealism of style-based GANs with the physical disentanglement and flexibility of nonlinear 3D morphable models, which we couple with a state-of-the-art 2D hair manipulation network. MOST-GAN achieves photorealistic manipulation of portrait images with fully disentangled 3D control over their physical attributes, enabling extreme manipulation of lighting, facial expression, and pose variations up to full profile view.

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Task-Customized Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Scalable Dynamic Routing

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Learning Complementary Representations of the Past using Auxiliary Tasks in Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning

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Task-Customized Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Scalable Dynamic Routing

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Learning Complementary Representations of the Past using Auxiliary Tasks in Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning

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