Relatedness Measures to Aid the Transfer of Building Blocks among Multiple Tasks

Multitask Learning is a learning paradigm that deals with multiple different tasks in parallel and transfers knowledge among them. XOF, a Learning Classifier System using tree-based programs to encode building blocks (meta-features), constructs and collects features with rich discriminative information for classification tasks in an observed list. This paper seeks to facilitate the automation of feature transferring in between tasks by utilising the observed list. We hypothesise that the best discriminative features of a classification task carry its characteristics. Therefore, the relatedness between any two tasks can be estimated by comparing their most appropriate patterns. We propose a multiple-XOF system, called mXOF, that can dynamically adapt feature transfer among XOFs. This system utilises the observed list to estimate the task relatedness. This method enables the automation of transferring features. In terms of knowledge discovery, the resemblance estimation provides insightful relations among multiple data. We experimented mXOF on various scenarios, e.g. representative Hierarchical Boolean problems, classification of distinct classes in the UCI Zoo dataset, and unrelated tasks, to validate its abilities of automatic knowledge-transfer and estimating task relatedness. Results show that mXOF can estimate the relatedness reasonably between multiple tasks to aid the learning performance with the dynamic feature transferring.Comment: accepted by The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2020

Discovering Blind Spots in Reinforcement Learning

Agents trained in simulation may make errors in the real world due to mismatches between training and execution environments. These mistakes can be dangerous and difficult to discover because the agent cannot predict them a priori. We propose using oracle feedback to learn a predictive model of these blind spots to reduce costly errors in real-world applications. We focus on blind spots in reinforcement learning (RL) that occur due to incomplete state representation: The agent does not have the appropriate features to represent the true state of the world and thus cannot distinguish among numerous states. We formalize the problem of discovering blind spots in RL as a noisy supervised learning problem with class imbalance. We learn models to predict blind spots in unseen regions of the state space by combining techniques for label aggregation, calibration, and supervised learning. The models take into consideration noise emerging from different forms of oracle feedback, including demonstrations and corrections. We evaluate our approach on two domains and show that it achieves higher predictive performance than baseline methods, and that the learned model can be used to selectively query an oracle at execution time to prevent errors. We also empirically analyze the biases of various feedback types and how they influence the discovery of blind spots.Comment: To appear at AAMAS 201

Compositional Falsification of Cyber-Physical Systems with Machine Learning Components

Cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as automotive systems, are starting to include sophisticated machine learning (ML) components. Their correctness, therefore, depends on properties of the inner ML modules. While learning algorithms aim to generalize from examples, they are only as good as the examples provided, and recent efforts have shown that they can produce inconsistent output under small adversarial perturbations. This raises the question: can the output from learning components can lead to a failure of the entire CPS? In this work, we address this question by formulating it as a problem of falsifying signal temporal logic (STL) specifications for CPS with ML components. We propose a compositional falsification framework where a temporal logic falsifier and a machine learning analyzer cooperate with the aim of finding falsifying executions of the considered model. The efficacy of the proposed technique is shown on an automatic emergency braking system model with a perception component based on deep neural networks