Out-of-Variable Generalization for Discriminative Models

The ability of an agent to do well in new environments is a critical aspect of intelligence. In machine learning, this ability is known as $\textit{strong}$ or $\textit{out-of-distribution}$ generalization. However, merely considering differences in data distributions is inadequate for fully capturing differences between learning environments. In the present paper, we investigate $\textit{out-of-variable}$ generalization, which pertains to an agent's generalization capabilities concerning environments with variables that were never jointly observed before. This skill closely reflects the process of animate learning: we, too, explore Nature by probing, observing, and measuring $\textit{subsets}$ of variables at any given time. Mathematically, $\textit{out-of-variable}$ generalization requires the efficient re-use of past marginal information, i.e., information over subsets of previously observed variables. We study this problem, focusing on prediction tasks across environments that contain overlapping, yet distinct, sets of causes. We show that after fitting a classifier, the residual distribution in one environment reveals the partial derivative of the true generating function with respect to the unobserved causal parent in that environment. We leverage this information and propose a method that exhibits non-trivial out-of-variable generalization performance when facing an overlapping, yet distinct, set of causal predictors

Generating entanglement between microwave photons and qubits in multiple cavities coupled by a superconducting qutrit

We discuss how to generate entangled coherent states of four \textrm{microwave} resonators \textrm{(a.k.a. cavities)} coupled by a superconducting qubit. We also show \textrm{that} a GHZ state of four superconducting qubits embedded in four different resonators \textrm{can be created with this scheme}. In principle, \textrm{the proposed method} can be extended to create an entangled coherent state of $n$ resonators and to prepare a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state of $n$ qubits distributed over $n$ cavities in a quantum network. In addition, it is noted that four resonators coupled by a coupler qubit may be used as a basic circuit block to build a two-dimensional quantum network, which is useful for scalable quantum information processing.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

On the Interventional Kullback-Leibler Divergence

Modern machine learning approaches excel in static settings where a large amount of i.i.d. training data are available for a given task. In a dynamic environment, though, an intelligent agent needs to be able to transfer knowledge and re-use learned components across domains. It has been argued that this may be possible through causal models, aiming to mirror the modularity of the real world in terms of independent causal mechanisms. However, the true causal structure underlying a given set of data is generally not identifiable, so it is desirable to have means to quantify differences between models (e.g., between the ground truth and an estimate), on both the observational and interventional level. In the present work, we introduce the Interventional Kullback-Leibler (IKL) divergence to quantify both structural and distributional differences between models based on a finite set of multi-environment distributions generated by interventions from the ground truth. Since we generally cannot quantify all differences between causal models for every finite set of interventional distributions, we propose a sufficient condition on the intervention targets to identify subsets of observed variables on which the models provably agree or disagree

MS-Net: A Multi-Path Sparse Model for Motion Prediction in Multi-Scenes

The multi-modality and stochastic characteristics of human behavior make motion prediction a highly challenging task, which is critical for autonomous driving. While deep learning approaches have demonstrated their great potential in this area, it still remains unsolved to establish a connection between multiple driving scenes (e.g., merging, roundabout, intersection) and the design of deep learning models. Current learning-based methods typically use one unified model to predict trajectories in different scenarios, which may result in sub-optimal results for one individual scene. To address this issue, we propose Multi-Scenes Network (aka. MS-Net), which is a multi-path sparse model trained by an evolutionary process. MS-Net selectively activates a subset of its parameters during the inference stage to produce prediction results for each scene. In the training stage, the motion prediction task under differentiated scenes is abstracted as a multi-task learning problem, an evolutionary algorithm is designed to encourage the network search of the optimal parameters for each scene while sharing common knowledge between different scenes. Our experiment results show that with substantially reduced parameters, MS-Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on well-established pedestrian motion prediction datasets, e.g., ETH and UCY, and ranks the 2nd place on the INTERACTION challenge.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL