19,188 research outputs found
Information-Geometric Optimization Algorithms: A Unifying Picture via Invariance Principles
We present a canonical way to turn any smooth parametric family of
probability distributions on an arbitrary search space into a
continuous-time black-box optimization method on , the
\emph{information-geometric optimization} (IGO) method. Invariance as a design
principle minimizes the number of arbitrary choices. The resulting \emph{IGO
flow} conducts the natural gradient ascent of an adaptive, time-dependent,
quantile-based transformation of the objective function. It makes no
assumptions on the objective function to be optimized.
The IGO method produces explicit IGO algorithms through time discretization.
It naturally recovers versions of known algorithms and offers a systematic way
to derive new ones. The cross-entropy method is recovered in a particular case,
and can be extended into a smoothed, parametrization-independent maximum
likelihood update (IGO-ML). For Gaussian distributions on , IGO
is related to natural evolution strategies (NES) and recovers a version of the
CMA-ES algorithm. For Bernoulli distributions on , we recover the
PBIL algorithm. From restricted Boltzmann machines, we obtain a novel algorithm
for optimization on . All these algorithms are unified under a
single information-geometric optimization framework.
Thanks to its intrinsic formulation, the IGO method achieves invariance under
reparametrization of the search space , under a change of parameters of the
probability distributions, and under increasing transformations of the
objective function.
Theory strongly suggests that IGO algorithms have minimal loss in diversity
during optimization, provided the initial diversity is high. First experiments
using restricted Boltzmann machines confirm this insight. Thus IGO seems to
provide, from information theory, an elegant way to spontaneously explore
several valleys of a fitness landscape in a single run.Comment: Final published versio
Manitest: Are classifiers really invariant?
Invariance to geometric transformations is a highly desirable property of
automatic classifiers in many image recognition tasks. Nevertheless, it is
unclear to which extent state-of-the-art classifiers are invariant to basic
transformations such as rotations and translations. This is mainly due to the
lack of general methods that properly measure such an invariance. In this
paper, we propose a rigorous and systematic approach for quantifying the
invariance to geometric transformations of any classifier. Our key idea is to
cast the problem of assessing a classifier's invariance as the computation of
geodesics along the manifold of transformed images. We propose the Manitest
method, built on the efficient Fast Marching algorithm to compute the
invariance of classifiers. Our new method quantifies in particular the
importance of data augmentation for learning invariance from data, and the
increased invariance of convolutional neural networks with depth. We foresee
that the proposed generic tool for measuring invariance to a large class of
geometric transformations and arbitrary classifiers will have many applications
for evaluating and comparing classifiers based on their invariance, and help
improving the invariance of existing classifiers.Comment: BMVC 201
Convolutional Radio Modulation Recognition Networks
We study the adaptation of convolutional neural networks to the complex
temporal radio signal domain. We compare the efficacy of radio modulation
classification using naively learned features against using expert features
which are widely used in the field today and we show significant performance
improvements. We show that blind temporal learning on large and densely encoded
time series using deep convolutional neural networks is viable and a strong
candidate approach for this task especially at low signal to noise ratio
Asimovian Adaptive Agents
The goal of this research is to develop agents that are adaptive and
predictable and timely. At first blush, these three requirements seem
contradictory. For example, adaptation risks introducing undesirable side
effects, thereby making agents' behavior less predictable. Furthermore,
although formal verification can assist in ensuring behavioral predictability,
it is known to be time-consuming. Our solution to the challenge of satisfying
all three requirements is the following. Agents have finite-state automaton
plans, which are adapted online via evolutionary learning (perturbation)
operators. To ensure that critical behavioral constraints are always satisfied,
agents' plans are first formally verified. They are then reverified after every
adaptation. If reverification concludes that constraints are violated, the
plans are repaired. The main objective of this paper is to improve the
efficiency of reverification after learning, so that agents have a sufficiently
rapid response time. We present two solutions: positive results that certain
learning operators are a priori guaranteed to preserve useful classes of
behavioral assurance constraints (which implies that no reverification is
needed for these operators), and efficient incremental reverification
algorithms for those learning operators that have negative a priori results
- …