Learning rational stochastic languages

15 pagesGiven a finite set of words w1,...,wn independently drawn according to a fixed unknown distribution law P called a stochastic language, an usual goal in Grammatical Inference is to infer an estimate of P in some class of probabilistic models, such as Probabilistic Automata (PA). Here, we study the class of rational stochastic languages, which consists in stochastic languages that can be generated by Multiplicity Automata (MA) and which strictly includes the class of stochastic languages generated by PA. Rational stochastic languages have minimal normal representation which may be very concise, and whose parameters can be efficiently estimated from stochastic samples. We design an efficient inference algorithm DEES which aims at building a minimal normal representation of the target. Despite the fact that no recursively enumerable class of MA computes exactly the set of rational stochastic languages over Q, we show that DEES strongly identifies tis set in the limit. We study the intermediary MA output by DEES and show that they compute rational series which converge absolutely to one and which can be used to provide stochastic languages which closely estimate the target

On knowledge representation and decision making under uncertainty

Designing systems with the ability to make optimal decisions under uncertainty is one of the goals of artificial intelligence. However, in many applications the design of optimal planners is complicated due to imprecise inputs and uncertain outputs resulting from stochastic dynamics. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a rich mathematical framework to model these kinds of problems. However, the high computational demand of solution methods for POMDPs is a drawback for applying them in practice.In this thesis, we present a two-fold approach for improving the tractability of POMDP planning. First, we focus on designing good heuristics for POMDP approximation algorithms. We aim to scale up the efficiency of a class of POMDP approximations called point-based planning methods by designing a good planning space. We study the effect of three properties of reachable belief state points that may influence the performance of point-based approximation methods. Second, we investigate approaches to designing good controllers using an alternative representation of systems with partial observability called Predictive State Representation (PSR). This part of the thesis advocates the usefulness and practicality of PSRs in planning under uncertainty. We also attempt to move some useful characteristics of the PSR model, which has a predictive view of the world, to the POMDP model, which has a probabilistic view of the hidden states of the world. We propose a planning algorithm motivated by the connections between the two models

On the Applications of Multiplicity Automata in Learning

Recently the learnability of multiplicity automata [8, 24] attracted a lot of attention, mainly because of its implications on the learnability of several classes of DNF formulae [7]. In this paper we further study the learnability of multiplicity automata. Our starting point is a known theorem from automata theory relating the number of states in a minimal multiplicity automaton for a function f to the rank of a certain matrix F . With this theorem in hand we obtain the following results: ffl A new simple algorithm for learning multiplicity automata in the spirit of [24] with a better query complexity. As a result, we improve the complexity for all classes that use the algorithms of [8, 24] and also obtain the best query complexity for several classes known to be learnable by other methods such as decision trees [13] and polynomials over GF(2) [26]. ffl We prove the learnability of some new classes that were not known to be learnable before. Most notably, the class of polynomials ov..