13,859 research outputs found
Local and Global Explanations of Agent Behavior: Integrating Strategy Summaries with Saliency Maps
With advances in reinforcement learning (RL), agents are now being developed
in high-stakes application domains such as healthcare and transportation.
Explaining the behavior of these agents is challenging, as the environments in
which they act have large state spaces, and their decision-making can be
affected by delayed rewards, making it difficult to analyze their behavior. To
address this problem, several approaches have been developed. Some approaches
attempt to convey the behavior of the agent, describing the
actions it takes in different states. Other approaches devised
explanations which provide information regarding the agent's decision-making in
a particular state. In this paper, we combine global and local explanation
methods, and evaluate their joint and separate contributions, providing (to the
best of our knowledge) the first user study of combined local and global
explanations for RL agents. Specifically, we augment strategy summaries that
extract important trajectories of states from simulations of the agent with
saliency maps which show what information the agent attends to. Our results
show that the choice of what states to include in the summary (global
information) strongly affects people's understanding of agents: participants
shown summaries that included important states significantly outperformed
participants who were presented with agent behavior in a randomly set of chosen
world-states. We find mixed results with respect to augmenting demonstrations
with saliency maps (local information), as the addition of saliency maps did
not significantly improve performance in most cases. However, we do find some
evidence that saliency maps can help users better understand what information
the agent relies on in its decision making, suggesting avenues for future work
that can further improve explanations of RL agents
Dynamic Bayesian Predictive Synthesis in Time Series Forecasting
We discuss model and forecast combination in time series forecasting. A
foundational Bayesian perspective based on agent opinion analysis theory
defines a new framework for density forecast combination, and encompasses
several existing forecast pooling methods. We develop a novel class of dynamic
latent factor models for time series forecast synthesis; simulation-based
computation enables implementation. These models can dynamically adapt to
time-varying biases, miscalibration and inter-dependencies among multiple
models or forecasters. A macroeconomic forecasting study highlights the dynamic
relationships among synthesized forecast densities, as well as the potential
for improved forecast accuracy at multiple horizons
Generating Method Documentation Using Concrete Values from Executions
There exist multiple automated approaches of source code documentation generation. They often describe methods in abstract terms, using the words contained in the static source code or code excerpts from repositories. In this paper, we introduce DynamiDoc - a simple yet effective automated documentation approach based on dynamic analysis. It traces the program being executed and records string representations of concrete argument values, a return value, and a target object state before and after each method execution. Then for every concerned method, it generates documentation sentences containing examples, such as "When called on [3, 1.2] with element = 3, the object changed to [1.2]". A qualitative evaluation is performed, listing advantages and shortcomings of the approach
Bayesian Synthesis: Combining subjective analyses, with an application to ozone data
Bayesian model averaging enables one to combine the disparate predictions of
a number of models in a coherent fashion, leading to superior predictive
performance. The improvement in performance arises from averaging models that
make different predictions. In this work, we tap into perhaps the biggest
driver of different predictions---different analysts---in order to gain the
full benefits of model averaging. In a standard implementation of our method,
several data analysts work independently on portions of a data set, eliciting
separate models which are eventually updated and combined through a specific
weighting method. We call this modeling procedure Bayesian Synthesis. The
methodology helps to alleviate concerns about the sizable gap between the
foundational underpinnings of the Bayesian paradigm and the practice of
Bayesian statistics. In experimental work we show that human modeling has
predictive performance superior to that of many automatic modeling techniques,
including AIC, BIC, Smoothing Splines, CART, Bagged CART, Bayes CART, BMA and
LARS, and only slightly inferior to that of BART. We also show that Bayesian
Synthesis further improves predictive performance. Additionally, we examine the
predictive performance of a simple average across analysts, which we dub Convex
Synthesis, and find that it also produces an improvement.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS444 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Spacetime geometry of static fluid spheres
We exhibit a simple and explicit formula for the metric of an arbitrary
static spherically symmetric perfect fluid spacetime. This class of metrics
depends on one freely specifiable monotone non-increasing generating function.
We also investigate various regularity conditions, and the constraints they
impose. Because we never make any assumptions as to the nature (or even the
existence) of an equation of state, this technique is useful in situations
where the equation of state is for whatever reason uncertain or unknown.
To illustrate the power of the method we exhibit a new form of the
``Goldman--I'' exact solution and calculate its total mass. This is a
three-parameter closed-form exact solution given in terms of algebraic
combinations of quadratics. It interpolates between (and thereby unifies) at
least six other reasonably well-known exact solutions.Comment: Plain LaTeX 2e -- V2: now 22 pages; minor presentation changes in the
first part of the paper -- no physics modifications; major additions to the
examples section: the Gold-I solution is shown to be identical to the G-G
solution. The interior Schwarzschild, Stewart, Buch5 XIII, de Sitter, anti-de
Sitter, and Einstein solutions are all special cases. V3: Reference,
footnotes, and acknowledgments added, typos fixed -- no physics
modifications. V4: Technical problems with mass formula fixed -- affects
discussion of our examples but not the core of the paper. Version to appear
in Classical and Quantum Gravit
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