Search

We propose a general framework for end-to-end learning of data structures. Our framework adapts to the underlying data distribution and provides fine-grained control over query and space complexity. Crucially, the data structure is learned from scratch, and does not require careful initialization or seeding with candidate data structures/algorithms. We first apply this framework to the problem of nearest neighbor search. In several settings, we are able to reverse-engineer the learned data structures and query algorithms. For 1D nearest neighbor search, the model discovers optimal distribution (in)dependent algorithms such as binary search and variants of interpolation search. In higher dimensions, the model learns solutions that resemble k-d trees in some regimes, while in others, they have elements of locality-sensitive hashing. The model can also learn useful representations of high-dimensional data and exploit them to design effective data structures. We also adapt our framework to the problem of estimating frequencies over a data stream, and believe it could also be a powerful discovery tool for new problems.

Traditional recommender systems rely on high-dimensional (latent) embeddings for modeling user-item interactions, often resulting in opaque representations that lack interpretability. Moreover, these systems offer limited control to users over their recommendations. Inspired by recent work, we introduce TExtuAl Representations for Scrutable recommendations (TEARS) to address these challenges. Instead of representing a user's interests through a latent embedding, TEARS encodes them in natural text, providing transparency and allowing users to edit them. To do so, TEARS uses a modern LLM to generate user summaries based on user preferences. We find the summaries capture user preferences uniquely. Using these summaries, we take a hybrid approach where we use an optimal transport procedure to align the summaries' representation with the learned representation of a standard VAE for collaborative filtering. We find this approach can surpass the performance of three popular VAE models while providing user-controllable recommendations. We also analyze the controllability of TEARS through three simulated user tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of a user editing its summary.

The growing number of parameter-efficient adaptations of a base large language model (LLM) calls for studying whether we can reuse such trained adapters to improve performance for new tasks. We study how to best build a library of adapters given multi-task data and devise techniques for both zero-shot and supervised task generalization through routing in such library. We benchmark existing approaches to build this library and introduce model-based clustering, MBC, a method that groups tasks based on the similarity of their adapter parameters, indirectly optimizing for transfer across the multi-task dataset. To re-use the library, we present a novel zero-shot routing mechanism, Arrow, which enables dynamic selection of the most relevant adapters for new inputs without the need for retraining. We experiment with several LLMs, such as Phi-2 and Mistral, on a wide array of held-out tasks, verifying that MBC-based adapters and Arrow routing lead to superior generalization to new tasks. We make steps towards creating modular, adaptable LLMs that can match or outperform traditional joint training.

We formulate a unifying framework for unsupervised continual learning (UCL), which disentangles learning objectives that are specific to the present and the past data, encompassing stability, plasticity, and cross-task consolidation. The framework reveals that many existing UCL approaches overlook cross-task consolidation and try to balance plasticity and stability in a shared embedding space. This results in worse performance due to a lack of within-task data diversity and reduced effectiveness in learning the current task. Our method, Osiris, which explicitly optimizes all three objectives on separate embedding spaces, achieves state-of-the-art performance on all benchmarks, including two novel benchmarks proposed in this paper featuring semantically structured task sequences. Compared to standard benchmarks, these two structured benchmarks more closely resemble visual signals received by humans and animals when navigating real-world environments. Finally, we show some preliminary evidence that continual models can benefit from such realistic learning scenarios., Comment: CoLLAs 2024 (Oral)

Conducting literature reviews for scientific papers is essential for understanding research, its limitations, and building on existing work. It is a tedious task which makes an automatic literature review generator appealing. Unfortunately, many existing works that generate such reviews using Large Language Models (LLMs) have significant limitations. They tend to hallucinate-generate non-actual information-and ignore the latest research they have not been trained on. To address these limitations, we propose a toolkit that operates on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) principles, specialized prompting and instructing techniques with the help of LLMs. Our system first initiates a web search to retrieve relevant papers by summarizing user-provided abstracts into keywords using an off-the-shelf LLM. Authors can enhance the search by supplementing it with relevant papers or keywords, contributing to a tailored retrieval process. Second, the system re-ranks the retrieved papers based on the user-provided abstract. Finally, the related work section is generated based on the re-ranked results and the abstract. There is a substantial reduction in time and effort for literature review compared to traditional methods, establishing our toolkit as an efficient alternative. Our open-source toolkit is accessible at https://github.com/shubhamagarwal92/LitLLM and Huggingface space (https://huggingface.co/spaces/shubhamagarwal92/LitLLM) with the video demo at https://youtu.be/E2ggOZBAFw0.

A number of deep reinforcement-learning (RL) approaches propose to control traffic signals. In this work, we study the robustness of such methods along two axes. First, sensor failures and GPS occlusions create missing-data challenges and we show that recent methods remain brittle in the face of these missing data. Second, we provide a more systematic study of the generalization ability of RL methods to new networks with different traffic regimes. Again, we identify the limitations of recent approaches. We then propose using a combination of distributional and vanilla reinforcement learning through a policy ensemble. Building upon the state-of-the-art previous model which uses a decentralized approach for large-scale traffic signal control with graph convolutional networks (GCNs), we first learn models using a distributional reinforcement learning (DisRL) approach. In particular, we use implicit quantile networks (IQN) to model the state-action return distribution with quantile regression. For traffic signal control problems, an ensemble of standard RL and DisRL yields superior performance across different scenarios, including different levels of missing sensor data and traffic flow patterns. Furthermore, the learning scheme of the resulting model can improve zero-shot transferability to different road network structures, including both synthetic networks and real-world networks (e.g., Luxembourg, Manhattan). We conduct extensive experiments to compare our approach to multi-agent reinforcement learning and traditional transportation approaches. Results show that the proposed method improves robustness and generalizability in the face of missing data, varying road networks, and traffic flows.

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), a class of generative models over discrete and structured sample spaces, have been previously applied to the problem of inferring the marginal posterior distribution over the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of a Bayesian Network, given a dataset of observations. Based on recent advances extending this framework to non-discrete sample spaces, we propose in this paper to approximate the joint posterior over not only the structure of a Bayesian Network, but also the parameters of its conditional probability distributions. We use a single GFlowNet whose sampling policy follows a two-phase process: the DAG is first generated sequentially one edge at a time, and then the corresponding parameters are picked once the full structure is known. Since the parameters are included in the posterior distribution, this leaves more flexibility for the local probability models of the Bayesian Network, making our approach applicable even to non-linear models parametrized by neural networks. We show that our method, called JSP-GFN, offers an accurate approximation of the joint posterior, while comparing favorably against existing methods on both simulated and real data.

The field of transfer learning is undergoing a significant shift with the introduction of large pretrained models which have demonstrated strong adaptability to a variety of downstream tasks. However, the high computational and memory requirements to finetune or use these models can be a hindrance to their widespread use. In this study, we present a solution to this issue by proposing a simple yet effective way to trade computational efficiency for asymptotic performance which we define as the performance a learning algorithm achieves as compute tends to infinity. Specifically, we argue that zero-shot structured pruning of pretrained models allows them to increase compute efficiency with minimal reduction in performance. We evaluate our method on the Nevis'22 continual learning benchmark that offers a diverse set of transfer scenarios. Our results show that pruning convolutional filters of pretrained models can lead to more than 20% performance improvement in low computational regimes.

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes.

Bayesian causal structure learning aims to learn a posterior distribution over directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and the mechanisms that define the relationship between parent and child variables. By taking a Bayesian approach, it is possible to reason about the uncertainty of the causal model. The notion of modelling the uncertainty over models is particularly crucial for causal structure learning since the model could be unidentifiable when given only a finite amount of observational data. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to jointly learn the structure and mechanisms of the causal model using Variational Bayes, which we call Variational Bayes-DAG-GFlowNet (VBG). We extend the method of Bayesian causal structure learning using GFlowNets to learn not only the posterior distribution over the structure, but also the parameters of a linear-Gaussian model. Our results on simulated data suggest that VBG is competitive against several baselines in modelling the posterior over DAGs and mechanisms, while offering several advantages over existing methods, including the guarantee to sample acyclic graphs, and the flexibility to generalize to non-linear causal mechanisms.

Most reinforcement learning methods for adaptive-traffic-signal-control require training from scratch to be applied on any new intersection or after any modification to the road network, traffic distribution, or behavioral constraints experienced during training. Considering 1) the massive amount of experience required to train such methods, and 2) that experience must be gathered by interacting in an exploratory fashion with real road-network-users, such a lack of transferability limits experimentation and applicability. Recent approaches enable learning policies that generalize for unseen road-network topologies and traffic distributions, partially tackling this challenge. However, the literature remains divided between the learning of cyclic (the evolution of connectivity at an intersection must respect a cycle) and acyclic (less constrained) policies, and these transferable methods 1) are only compatible with cyclic constraints and 2) do not enable coordination. We introduce a new model-based method, MuJAM, which, on top of enabling explicit coordination at scale for the first time, pushes generalization further by allowing a generalization to the controllers' constraints. In a zero-shot transfer setting involving both road networks and traffic settings never experienced during training, and in a larger transfer experiment involving the control of 3,971 traffic signal controllers in Manhattan, we show that MuJAM, using both cyclic and acyclic constraints, outperforms domain-specific baselines as well as another transferable approach., Comment: 11 pages, 3 tables, 4 figures

Building learning agents that can progressively learn and accumulate knowledge is the core goal of the continual learning (CL) research field. Unfortunately, training a model on new data usually compromises the performance on past data. In the CL literature, this effect is referred to as catastrophic forgetting (CF). CF has been largely studied, and a plethora of methods have been proposed to address it on short sequences of non-overlapping tasks. In such setups, CF always leads to a quick and significant drop in performance in past tasks. Nevertheless, despite CF, recent work showed that SGD training on linear models accumulates knowledge in a CL regression setup. This phenomenon becomes especially visible when tasks reoccur. We might then wonder if DNNs trained with SGD or any standard gradient-based optimization accumulate knowledge in such a way. Such phenomena would have interesting consequences for applying DNNs to real continual scenarios. Indeed, standard gradient-based optimization methods are significantly less computationally expensive than existing CL algorithms. In this paper, we study the progressive knowledge accumulation (KA) in DNNs trained with gradient-based algorithms in long sequences of tasks with data re-occurrence. We propose a new framework, SCoLe (Scaling Continual Learning), to investigate KA and discover that catastrophic forgetting has a limited effect on DNNs trained with SGD. When trained on long sequences with data sparsely re-occurring, the overall accuracy improves, which might be counter-intuitive given the CF phenomenon. We empirically investigate KA in DNNs under various data occurrence frequencies and propose simple and scalable strategies to increase knowledge accumulation in DNNs.

Cutting planes are essential for solving mixed-integer linear problems (MILPs), because they facilitate bound improvements on the optimal solution value. For selecting cuts, modern solvers rely on manually designed heuristics that are tuned to gauge the potential effectiveness of cuts. We show that a greedy selection rule explicitly looking ahead to select cuts that yield the best bound improvement delivers strong decisions for cut selection - but is too expensive to be deployed in practice. In response, we propose a new neural architecture (NeuralCut) for imitation learning on the lookahead expert. Our model outperforms standard baselines for cut selection on several synthetic MILP benchmarks. Experiments with a B&C solver for neural network verification further validate our approach, and exhibit the potential of learning methods in this setting., Comment: ICML 2022

Continual learning (CL) enables the development of models and agents that learn from a sequence of tasks while addressing the limitations of standard deep learning approaches, such as catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we investigate the factors that contribute to the performance differences between task-agnostic CL and multi-task (MTL) agents. We pose two hypotheses: (1) task-agnostic methods might provide advantages in settings with limited data, computation, or high dimensionality, and (2) faster adaptation may be particularly beneficial in continual learning settings, helping to mitigate the effects of catastrophic forgetting. To investigate these hypotheses, we introduce a replay-based recurrent reinforcement learning (3RL) methodology for task-agnostic CL agents. We assess 3RL on a synthetic task and the Meta-World benchmark, which includes 50 unique manipulation tasks. Our results demonstrate that 3RL outperforms baseline methods and can even surpass its multi-task equivalent in challenging settings with high dimensionality. We also show that the recurrent task-agnostic agent consistently outperforms or matches the performance of its transformer-based counterpart. These findings provide insights into the advantages of task-agnostic CL over task-aware MTL approaches and highlight the potential of task-agnostic methods in resource-constrained, high-dimensional, and multi-task environments.

Rapid development of large-scale pre-training has resulted in foundation models that can act as effective feature extractors on a variety of downstream tasks and domains. Motivated by this, we study the efficacy of pre-trained vision models as a foundation for downstream continual learning (CL) scenarios. Our goal is twofold. First, we want to understand the compute-accuracy trade-off between CL in the raw-data space and in the latent space of pre-trained encoders. Second, we investigate how the characteristics of the encoder, the pre-training algorithm and data, as well as of the resulting latent space affect CL performance. For this, we compare the efficacy of various pre-trained models in large-scale benchmarking scenarios with a vanilla replay setting applied in the latent and in the raw-data space. Notably, this study shows how transfer, forgetting, task similarity and learning are dependent on the input data characteristics and not necessarily on the CL algorithms. First, we show that under some circumstances reasonable CL performance can readily be achieved with a non-parametric classifier at negligible compute. We then show how models pre-trained on broader data result in better performance for various replay sizes. We explain this with representational similarity and transfer properties of these representations. Finally, we show the effectiveness of self-supervised pre-training for downstream domains that are out-of-distribution as compared to the pre-training domain. We point out and validate several research directions that can further increase the efficacy of latent CL including representation ensembling. The diverse set of datasets used in this study can serve as a compute-efficient playground for further CL research. The codebase is available under https://github.com/oleksost/latent_CL.

Combinatorial optimization is a well-established area in operations research and computer science. Until recently, its methods have focused on solving problem instances in isolation, ignoring that they often stem from related data distributions in practice. However, recent years have seen a surge of interest in using machine learning as a new approach for solving combinatorial problems, either directly as solvers or by enhancing exact solvers. Based on this context, the ML4CO aims at improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components. The competition featured three challenging tasks: finding the best feasible solution, producing the tightest optimality certificate, and giving an appropriate solver configuration. Three realistic datasets were considered: balanced item placement, workload apportionment, and maritime inventory routing. This last dataset was kept anonymous for the contestants., Comment: Neurips 2021 competition. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2112.12251 by other authors

Despite artificial intelligence (AI) having transformed major aspects of our society, less than a fraction of its potential has been explored, let alone deployed, for education. AI-powered learning can provide millions of learners with a highly personalized, active and practical learning experience, which is key to successful learning. This is especially relevant in the context of online learning platforms. In this paper, we present the results of a comparative head-to-head study on learning outcomes for two popular online learning platforms (n=199 participants): A MOOC platform following a traditional model delivering content using lecture videos and multiple-choice quizzes, and the Korbit learning platform providing a highly personalized, active and practical learning experience. We observe a huge and statistically significant increase in the learning outcomes, with students on the Korbit platform providing full feedback resulting in higher course completion rates and achieving learning gains 2 to 2.5 times higher than both students on the MOOC platform and students in a control group who don't receive personalized feedback on the Korbit platform. The results demonstrate the tremendous impact that can be achieved with a personalized, active learning AI-powered system. Making this technology and learning experience available to millions of learners around the world will represent a significant leap forward towards the democratization of education., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures

Modularity is a compelling solution to continual learning (CL), the problem of modeling sequences of related tasks. Learning and then composing modules to solve different tasks provides an abstraction to address the principal challenges of CL including catastrophic forgetting, backward and forward transfer across tasks, and sub-linear model growth. We introduce local module composition (LMC), an approach to modular CL where each module is provided a local structural component that estimates a module's relevance to the input. Dynamic module composition is performed layer-wise based on local relevance scores. We demonstrate that agnosticity to task identities (IDs) arises from (local) structural learning that is module-specific as opposed to the task- and/or model-specific as in previous works, making LMC applicable to more CL settings compared to previous works. In addition, LMC also tracks statistics about the input distribution and adds new modules when outlier samples are detected. In the first set of experiments, LMC performs favorably compared to existing methods on the recent Continual Transfer-learning Benchmark without requiring task identities. In another study, we show that the locality of structural learning allows LMC to interpolate to related but unseen tasks (OOD), as well as to compose modular networks trained independently on different task sequences into a third modular network without any fine-tuning. Finally, in search for limitations of LMC we study it on more challenging sequences of 30 and 100 tasks, demonstrating that local module selection becomes much more challenging in presence of a large number of candidate modules. In this setting best performing LMC spawns much fewer modules compared to an oracle based baseline, however, it reaches a lower overall accuracy. The codebase is available under https://github.com/oleksost/LMC.

The field of Continual Learning (CL) seeks to develop algorithms that accumulate knowledge and skills over time through interaction with non-stationary environments. In practice, a plethora of evaluation procedures (settings) and algorithmic solutions (methods) exist, each with their own potentially disjoint set of assumptions. This variety makes measuring progress in CL difficult. We propose a taxonomy of settings, where each setting is described as a set of assumptions. A tree-shaped hierarchy emerges from this view, where more general settings become the parents of those with more restrictive assumptions. This makes it possible to use inheritance to share and reuse research, as developing a method for a given setting also makes it directly applicable onto any of its children. We instantiate this idea as a publicly available software framework called Sequoia, which features a wide variety of settings from both the Continual Supervised Learning (CSL) and Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) domains. Sequoia also includes a growing suite of methods which are easy to extend and customize, in addition to more specialized methods from external libraries. We hope that this new paradigm and its first implementation can help unify and accelerate research in CL. You can help us grow the tree by visiting www.github.com/lebrice/Sequoia.

Data efficiency is a key challenge for deep reinforcement learning. We address this problem by using unlabeled data to pretrain an encoder which is then finetuned on a small amount of task-specific data. To encourage learning representations which capture diverse aspects of the underlying MDP, we employ a combination of latent dynamics modelling and unsupervised goal-conditioned RL. When limited to 100k steps of interaction on Atari games (equivalent to two hours of human experience), our approach significantly surpasses prior work combining offline representation pretraining with task-specific finetuning, and compares favourably with other pretraining methods that require orders of magnitude more data. Our approach shows particular promise when combined with larger models as well as more diverse, task-aligned observational data -- approaching human-level performance and data-efficiency on Atari in our best setting. We provide code associated with this work at https://github.com/mila-iqia/SGI.

Personalization and active learning are key aspects to successful learning. These aspects are important to address in intelligent educational applications, as they help systems to adapt and close the gap between students with varying abilities, which becomes increasingly important in the context of online and distance learning. We run a comparative head-to-head study of learning outcomes for two popular online learning platforms: Platform A, which follows a traditional model delivering content over a series of lecture videos and multiple-choice quizzes, and Platform B, which creates a personalized learning environment and provides problem-solving exercises and personalized feedback. We report on the results of our study using pre- and post-assessment quizzes with participants taking courses on an introductory data science topic on two platforms. We observe a statistically significant increase in the learning outcomes on Platform B, highlighting the impact of well-designed and well-engineered technology supporting active learning and problem-based learning in online education. Moreover, the results of the self-assessment questionnaire, where participants reported on perceived learning gains, suggest that participants using Platform B improve their metacognition., Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, accepted at AIED 2021 (2021 Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education)

Explainability for machine learning models has gained considerable attention within the research community given the importance of deploying more reliable machine-learning systems. In computer vision applications, generative counterfactual methods indicate how to perturb a model's input to change its prediction, providing details about the model's decision-making. Current methods tend to generate trivial counterfactuals about a model's decisions, as they often suggest to exaggerate or remove the presence of the attribute being classified. For the machine learning practitioner, these types of counterfactuals offer little value, since they provide no new information about undesired model or data biases. In this work, we identify the problem of trivial counterfactual generation and we propose DiVE to alleviate it. DiVE learns a perturbation in a disentangled latent space that is constrained using a diversity-enforcing loss to uncover multiple valuable explanations about the model's prediction. Further, we introduce a mechanism to prevent the model from producing trivial explanations. Experiments on CelebA and Synbols demonstrate that our model improves the success rate of producing high-quality valuable explanations when compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ElementAI/beyond-trivial-explanations., Comment: ICCV 2021

Multi-document summarization is a challenging task for which there exists little large-scale datasets. We propose Multi-XScience, a large-scale multi-document summarization dataset created from scientific articles. Multi-XScience introduces a challenging multi-document summarization task: writing the related-work section of a paper based on its abstract and the articles it references. Our work is inspired by extreme summarization, a dataset construction protocol that favours abstractive modeling approaches. Descriptive statistics and empirical results---using several state-of-the-art models trained on the Multi-XScience dataset---reveal that Multi-XScience is well suited for abstractive models., Comment: EMNLP 2020

Progress in the field of machine learning has been fueled by the introduction of benchmark datasets pushing the limits of existing algorithms. Enabling the design of datasets to test specific properties and failure modes of learning algorithms is thus a problem of high interest, as it has a direct impact on innovation in the field. In this sense, we introduce Synbols -- Synthetic Symbols -- a tool for rapidly generating new datasets with a rich composition of latent features rendered in low resolution images. Synbols leverages the large amount of symbols available in the Unicode standard and the wide range of artistic font provided by the open font community. Our tool's high-level interface provides a language for rapidly generating new distributions on the latent features, including various types of textures and occlusions. To showcase the versatility of Synbols, we use it to dissect the limitations and flaws in standard learning algorithms in various learning setups including supervised learning, active learning, out of distribution generalization, unsupervised representation learning, and object counting.

We present Korbit, a large-scale, open-domain, mixed-interface, dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS). Korbit uses machine learning, natural language processing and reinforcement learning to provide interactive, personalized learning online. Korbit has been designed to easily scale to thousands of subjects, by automating, standardizing and simplifying the content creation process. Unlike other ITS, a teacher can develop new learning modules for Korbit in a matter of hours. To facilitate learning across a widerange of STEM subjects, Korbit uses a mixed-interface, which includes videos, interactive dialogue-based exercises, question-answering, conceptual diagrams, mathematical exercises and gamification elements. Korbit has been built to scale to millions of students, by utilizing a state-of-the-art cloud-based micro-service architecture. Korbit launched its first course in 2019 on machine learning, and since then over 7,000 students have enrolled. Although Korbit was designed to be open-domain and highly scalable, A/B testing experiments with real-world students demonstrate that both student learning outcomes and student motivation are substantially improved compared to typical online courses., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, accepted for publication in the 21st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2020)

Recent statistical methods fitted on large-scale GPS data can provide accurate estimations of the expected travel time between two points. However, little is known about the distribution of travel time, which is key to decision-making across a number of logistic problems. With sufficient data, single road-segment travel time can be well approximated. The challenge lies in understanding how to aggregate such information over a route to arrive at the route-distribution of travel time. We develop a novel statistical approach to this problem. We show that, under general conditions, without assuming a distribution of speed, travel time {divided by route distance follows a Gaussian distribution with route-invariant population mean and variance. We develop efficient inference methods for such parameters and propose asymptotically tight population prediction intervals for travel time. Using traffic flow information, we further develop a trip-specific Gaussian-based predictive distribution, resulting in tight prediction intervals for short and long trips. Our methods, implemented in an R-package, are illustrated in a real-world case study using mobile GPS data, showing that our trip-specific and population intervals both achieve the 95\% theoretical coverage levels. Compared to alternative approaches, our trip-specific predictive distribution achieves (a) the theoretical coverage at every level of significance, (b) tighter prediction intervals, (c) less predictive bias, and (d) more efficient estimation and prediction procedures. This makes our approach promising for low-latency, large-scale transportation applications., Comment: 27 main pages (38 total). This version includes stylistic changes to the previous one

Continual learning studies agents that learn from streams of tasks without forgetting previous ones while adapting to new ones. Two recent continual-learning scenarios have opened new avenues of research. In meta-continual learning, the model is pre-trained to minimize catastrophic forgetting of previous tasks. In continual-meta learning, the aim is to train agents for faster remembering of previous tasks through adaptation. In their original formulations, both methods have limitations. We stand on their shoulders to propose a more general scenario, OSAKA, where an agent must quickly solve new (out-of-distribution) tasks, while also requiring fast remembering. We show that current continual learning, meta-learning, meta-continual learning, and continual-meta learning techniques fail in this new scenario. We propose Continual-MAML, an online extension of the popular MAML algorithm as a strong baseline for this scenario. We empirically show that Continual-MAML is better suited to the new scenario than the aforementioned methodologies, as well as standard continual learning and meta-learning approaches.

Scaling adaptive traffic-signal control involves dealing with combinatorial state and action spaces. Multi-agent reinforcement learning attempts to address this challenge by distributing control to specialized agents. However, specialization hinders generalization and transferability, and the computational graphs underlying neural-networks architectures -- dominating in the multi-agent setting -- do not offer the flexibility to handle an arbitrary number of entities which changes both between road networks, and over time as vehicles traverse the network. We introduce Inductive Graph Reinforcement Learning (IG-RL) based on graph-convolutional networks which adapts to the structure of any road network, to learn detailed representations of traffic-controllers and their surroundings. Our decentralized approach enables learning of a transferable-adaptive-traffic-signal-control policy. After being trained on an arbitrary set of road networks, our model can generalize to new road networks, traffic distributions, and traffic regimes, with no additional training and a constant number of parameters, enabling greater scalability compared to prior methods. Furthermore, our approach can exploit the granularity of available data by capturing the (dynamic) demand at both the lane and the vehicle levels. The proposed method is tested on both road networks and traffic settings never experienced during training. We compare IG-RL to multi-agent reinforcement learning and domain-specific baselines. In both synthetic road networks and in a larger experiment involving the control of the 3,971 traffic signals of Manhattan, we show that different instantiations of IG-RL outperform baselines., Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (2021)

Continual learning, the setting where a learning agent is faced with a never ending stream of data, continues to be a great challenge for modern machine learning systems. In particular the online or "single-pass through the data" setting has gained attention recently as a natural setting that is difficult to tackle. Methods based on replay, either generative or from a stored memory, have been shown to be effective approaches for continual learning, matching or exceeding the state of the art in a number of standard benchmarks. These approaches typically rely on randomly selecting samples from the replay memory or from a generative model, which is suboptimal. In this work, we consider a controlled sampling of memories for replay. We retrieve the samples which are most interfered, i.e. whose prediction will be most negatively impacted by the foreseen parameters update. We show a formulation for this sampling criterion in both the generative replay and the experience replay setting, producing consistent gains in performance and greatly reduced forgetting. We release an implementation of our method at https://github.com/optimass/Maximally_Interfered_Retrieval.

Combinatorial optimization problems are typically tackled by the branch-and-bound paradigm. We propose a new graph convolutional neural network model for learning branch-and-bound variable selection policies, which leverages the natural variable-constraint bipartite graph representation of mixed-integer linear programs. We train our model via imitation learning from the strong branching expert rule, and demonstrate on a series of hard problems that our approach produces policies that improve upon state-of-the-art machine-learning methods for branching and generalize to instances significantly larger than seen during training. Moreover, we improve for the first time over expert-designed branching rules implemented in a state-of-the-art solver on large problems. Code for reproducing all the experiments can be found at https://github.com/ds4dm/learn2branch., Comment: Accepted paper at the NeurIPS 2019 conference

Continual learning consists in incrementally training a model on a sequence of datasets and testing on the union of all datasets. In this paper, we examine continual learning for the problem of sound classification, in which we wish to refine already trained models to learn new sound classes. In practice one does not want to maintain all past training data and retrain from scratch, but naively updating a model with new data(sets) results in a degradation of already learned tasks, which is referred to as "catastrophic forgetting." We develop a generative replay procedure for generating training audio spectrogram data, in place of keeping older training datasets. We show that by incrementally refining a classifier with generative replay a generator that is 4% of the size of all previous training data matches the performance of refining the classifier keeping 20% of all previous training data. We thus conclude that we can extend a trained sound classifier to learn new classes without having to keep previously used datasets.

Online communities such as Facebook and Twitter are enormously popular and have become an essential part of the daily life of many of their users. Through these platforms, users can discover and create information that others will then consume. In that context, recommending relevant information to users becomes critical for viability. However, recommendation in online communities is a challenging problem: 1) users' interests are dynamic, and 2) users are influenced by their friends. Moreover, the influencers may be context-dependent. That is, different friends may be relied upon for different topics. Modeling both signals is therefore essential for recommendations. We propose a recommender system for online communities based on a dynamic-graph-attention neural network. We model dynamic user behaviors with a recurrent neural network, and context-dependent social influence with a graph-attention neural network, which dynamically infers the influencers based on users' current interests. The whole model can be efficiently fit on large-scale data. Experimental results on several real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach over several competitive baselines including state-of-the-art models., Comment: Published as a conference paper at WSDM2019. Source code and data are available online

There has been growing interest in using neural networks and deep learning techniques to create dialogue systems. Conversational recommendation is an interesting setting for the scientific exploration of dialogue with natural language as the associated discourse involves goal-driven dialogue that often transforms naturally into more free-form chat. This paper provides two contributions. First, until now there has been no publicly available large-scale dataset consisting of real-world dialogues centered around recommendations. To address this issue and to facilitate our exploration here, we have collected ReDial, a dataset consisting of over 10,000 conversations centered around the theme of providing movie recommendations. We make this data available to the community for further research. Second, we use this dataset to explore multiple facets of conversational recommendations. In particular we explore new neural architectures, mechanisms, and methods suitable for composing conversational recommendation systems. Our dataset allows us to systematically probe model sub-components addressing different parts of the overall problem domain ranging from: sentiment analysis and cold-start recommendation generation to detailed aspects of how natural language is used in this setting in the real world. We combine such sub-components into a full-blown dialogue system and examine its behavior., Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, Accepted at 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018), Montr\'eal, Canada

Generating high-quality text with sufficient diversity is essential for a wide range of Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. Maximum-Likelihood (MLE) models trained with teacher forcing have consistently been reported as weak baselines, where poor performance is attributed to exposure bias (Bengio et al., 2015; Ranzato et al., 2015); at inference time, the model is fed its own prediction instead of a ground-truth token, which can lead to accumulating errors and poor samples. This line of reasoning has led to an outbreak of adversarial based approaches for NLG, on the account that GANs do not suffer from exposure bias. In this work, we make several surprising observations which contradict common beliefs. First, we revisit the canonical evaluation framework for NLG, and point out fundamental flaws with quality-only evaluation: we show that one can outperform such metrics using a simple, well-known temperature parameter to artificially reduce the entropy of the model's conditional distributions. Second, we leverage the control over the quality / diversity trade-off given by this parameter to evaluate models over the whole quality-diversity spectrum and find MLE models constantly outperform the proposed GAN variants over the whole quality-diversity space. Our results have several implications: 1) The impact of exposure bias on sample quality is less severe than previously thought, 2) temperature tuning provides a better quality / diversity trade-off than adversarial training while being easier to train, easier to cross-validate, and less computationally expensive. Code to reproduce the experiments is available at github.com/pclucas14/GansFallingShort

The goal of recommendation is to show users items that they will like. Though usually framed as a prediction, the spirit of recommendation is to answer an interventional question---for each user and movie, what would the rating be if we "forced" the user to watch the movie? To this end, we develop a causal approach to recommendation, one where watching a movie is a "treatment" and a user's rating is an "outcome." The problem is there may be unobserved confounders, variables that affect both which movies the users watch and how they rate them; unobserved confounders impede causal predictions with observational data. To solve this problem, we develop the deconfounded recommender, a way to use classical recommendation models for causal recommendation. Following Wang & Blei [23], the deconfounded recommender involves two probabilistic models. The first models which movies the users watch; it provides a substitute for the unobserved confounders. The second one models how each user rates each movie; it employs the substitute to help account for confounders. This two-stage approach removes bias due to confounding. It improves recommendation and enjoys stable performance against interventions on test sets., Comment: 15 pages

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with attention mechanisms have obtained state-of-the-art results for many sequence processing tasks. Most of these models use a simple form of encoder with attention that looks over the entire sequence and assigns a weight to each token independently. We present a mechanism for focusing RNN encoders for sequence modelling tasks which allows them to attend to key parts of the input as needed. We formulate this using a multi-layer conditional sequence encoder that reads in one token at a time and makes a discrete decision on whether the token is relevant to the context or question being asked. The discrete gating mechanism takes in the context embedding and the current hidden state as inputs and controls information flow into the layer above. We train it using policy gradient methods. We evaluate this method on several types of tasks with different attributes. First, we evaluate the method on synthetic tasks which allow us to evaluate the model for its generalization ability and probe the behavior of the gates in more controlled settings. We then evaluate this approach on large scale Question Answering tasks including the challenging MS MARCO and SearchQA tasks. Our models shows consistent improvements for both tasks over prior work and our baselines. It has also shown to generalize significantly better on synthetic tasks as compared to the baselines., Comment: To appear at ICML 2018

A major drawback of backpropagation through time (BPTT) is the difficulty of learning long-term dependencies, coming from having to propagate credit information backwards through every single step of the forward computation. This makes BPTT both computationally impractical and biologically implausible. For this reason, full backpropagation through time is rarely used on long sequences, and truncated backpropagation through time is used as a heuristic. However, this usually leads to biased estimates of the gradient in which longer term dependencies are ignored. Addressing this issue, we propose an alternative algorithm, Sparse Attentive Backtracking, which might also be related to principles used by brains to learn long-term dependencies. Sparse Attentive Backtracking learns an attention mechanism over the hidden states of the past and selectively backpropagates through paths with high attention weights. This allows the model to learn long term dependencies while only backtracking for a small number of time steps, not just from the recent past but also from attended relevant past states.

In this paper, we study two aspects of the variational autoencoder (VAE): the prior distribution over the latent variables and its corresponding posterior. First, we decompose the learning of VAEs into layerwise density estimation, and argue that having a flexible prior is beneficial to both sample generation and inference. Second, we analyze the family of inverse autoregressive flows (inverse AF) and show that with further improvement, inverse AF could be used as universal approximation to any complicated posterior. Our analysis results in a unified approach to parameterizing a VAE, without the need to restrict ourselves to use factorial Gaussians in the latent real space., Comment: 2 figures, 5 pages, submitted to ICML Principled Approaches to Deep Learning workshop

Researchers have recently started investigating deep neural networks for dialogue applications. In particular, generative sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models have shown promising results for unstructured tasks, such as word-level dialogue response generation. The hope is that such models will be able to leverage massive amounts of data to learn meaningful natural language representations and response generation strategies, while requiring a minimum amount of domain knowledge and hand-crafting. An important challenge is to develop models that can effectively incorporate dialogue context and generate meaningful and diverse responses. In support of this goal, we review recently proposed models based on generative encoder-decoder neural network architectures, and show that these models have better ability to incorporate long-term dialogue history, to model uncertainty and ambiguity in dialogue, and to generate responses with high-level compositional structure., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables; NIPS 2016 workshop on Learning Methods for Dialogue

Sequential data often possesses a hierarchical structure with complex dependencies between subsequences, such as found between the utterances in a dialogue. In an effort to model this kind of generative process, we propose a neural network-based generative architecture, with latent stochastic variables that span a variable number of time steps. We apply the proposed model to the task of dialogue response generation and compare it with recent neural network architectures. We evaluate the model performance through automatic evaluation metrics and by carrying out a human evaluation. The experiments demonstrate that our model improves upon recently proposed models and that the latent variables facilitate the generation of long outputs and maintain the context., Comment: 15 pages, 5 tables, 4 figures

An open challenge in constructing dialogue systems is developing methods for automatically learning dialogue strategies from large amounts of unlabelled data. Recent work has proposed Next-Utterance-Classification (NUC) as a surrogate task for building dialogue systems from text data. In this paper we investigate the performance of humans on this task to validate the relevance of NUC as a method of evaluation. Our results show three main findings: (1) humans are able to correctly classify responses at a rate much better than chance, thus confirming that the task is feasible, (2) human performance levels vary across task domains (we consider 3 datasets) and expertise levels (novice vs experts), thus showing that a range of performance is possible on this type of task, (3) automated dialogue systems built using state-of-the-art machine learning methods have similar performance to the human novices, but worse than the experts, thus confirming the utility of this class of tasks for driving further research in automated dialogue systems., Comment: Accepted to SIGDIAL 2016 (short paper). 5 pages

We investigate evaluation metrics for dialogue response generation systems where supervised labels, such as task completion, are not available. Recent works in response generation have adopted metrics from machine translation to compare a model's generated response to a single target response. We show that these metrics correlate very weakly with human judgements in the non-technical Twitter domain, and not at all in the technical Ubuntu domain. We provide quantitative and qualitative results highlighting specific weaknesses in existing metrics, and provide recommendations for future development of better automatic evaluation metrics for dialogue systems., Comment: First 4 authors had equal contribution. 13 pages, 5 tables, 6 figures. EMNLP 2016

During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of dialogue systems, the trend is less obvious, and most practical systems are still built through significant engineering and expert knowledge. Nevertheless, several recent results suggest that data-driven approaches are feasible and quite promising. To facilitate research in this area, we have carried out a wide survey of publicly available datasets suitable for data-driven learning of dialogue systems. We discuss important characteristics of these datasets, how they can be used to learn diverse dialogue strategies, and their other potential uses. We also examine methods for transfer learning between datasets and the use of external knowledge. Finally, we discuss appropriate choice of evaluation metrics for the learning objective., Comment: 56 pages including references and appendix, 5 tables and 1 figure; Under review for the Dialogue & Discourse journal. Update: paper has been rewritten and now includes several new datasets

Collaborative filtering analyzes user preferences for items (e.g., books, movies, restaurants, academic papers) by exploiting the similarity patterns across users. In implicit feedback settings, all the items, including the ones that a user did not consume, are taken into consideration. But this assumption does not accord with the common sense understanding that users have a limited scope and awareness of items. For example, a user might not have heard of a certain paper, or might live too far away from a restaurant to experience it. In the language of causal analysis, the assignment mechanism (i.e., the items that a user is exposed to) is a latent variable that may change for various user/item combinations. In this paper, we propose a new probabilistic approach that directly incorporates user exposure to items into collaborative filtering. The exposure is modeled as a latent variable and the model infers its value from data. In doing so, we recover one of the most successful state-of-the-art approaches as a special case of our model, and provide a plug-in method for conditioning exposure on various forms of exposure covariates (e.g., topics in text, venue locations). We show that our scalable inference algorithm outperforms existing benchmarks in four different domains both with and without exposure covariates., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. WWW'16

Models for recommender systems use latent factors to explain the preferences and behaviors of users with respect to a set of items (e.g., movies, books, academic papers). Typically, the latent factors are assumed to be static and, given these factors, the observed preferences and behaviors of users are assumed to be generated without order. These assumptions limit the explorative and predictive capabilities of such models, since users' interests and item popularity may evolve over time. To address this, we propose dPF, a dynamic matrix factorization model based on the recent Poisson factorization model for recommendations. dPF models the time evolving latent factors with a Kalman filter and the actions with Poisson distributions. We derive a scalable variational inference algorithm to infer the latent factors. Finally, we demonstrate dPF on 10 years of user click data from arXiv.org, one of the largest repository of scientific papers and a formidable source of information about the behavior of scientists. Empirically we show performance improvement over both static and, more recently proposed, dynamic recommendation models. We also provide a thorough exploration of the inferred posteriors over the latent variables., Comment: RecSys 2015