263 research outputs found
Multi-resolution Tensor Learning for Large-Scale Spatial Data
High-dimensional tensor models are notoriously computationally expensive to
train. We present a meta-learning algorithm, MMT, that can significantly speed
up the process for spatial tensor models. MMT leverages the property that
spatial data can be viewed at multiple resolutions, which are related by
coarsening and finegraining from one resolution to another. Using this
property, MMT learns a tensor model by starting from a coarse resolution and
iteratively increasing the model complexity. In order to not "over-train" on
coarse resolution models, we investigate an information-theoretic fine-graining
criterion to decide when to transition into higher-resolution models. We
provide both theoretical and empirical evidence for the advantages of this
approach. When applied to two real-world large-scale spatial datasets for
basketball player and animal behavior modeling, our approach demonstrate 3 key
benefits: 1) it efficiently captures higher-order interactions (i.e., tensor
latent factors), 2) it is orders of magnitude faster than fixed resolution
learning and scales to very fine-grained spatial resolutions, and 3) it
reliably yields accurate and interpretable models
Iterative Amortized Inference
Inference models are a key component in scaling variational inference to deep
latent variable models, most notably as encoder networks in variational
auto-encoders (VAEs). By replacing conventional optimization-based inference
with a learned model, inference is amortized over data examples and therefore
more computationally efficient. However, standard inference models are
restricted to direct mappings from data to approximate posterior estimates. The
failure of these models to reach fully optimized approximate posterior
estimates results in an amortization gap. We aim toward closing this gap by
proposing iterative inference models, which learn to perform inference
optimization through repeatedly encoding gradients. Our approach generalizes
standard inference models in VAEs and provides insight into several empirical
findings, including top-down inference techniques. We demonstrate the inference
optimization capabilities of iterative inference models and show that they
outperform standard inference models on several benchmark data sets of images
and text.Comment: International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 201
Generating Long-term Trajectories Using Deep Hierarchical Networks
We study the problem of modeling spatiotemporal trajectories over long time
horizons using expert demonstrations. For instance, in sports, agents often
choose action sequences with long-term goals in mind, such as achieving a
certain strategic position. Conventional policy learning approaches, such as
those based on Markov decision processes, generally fail at learning cohesive
long-term behavior in such high-dimensional state spaces, and are only
effective when myopic modeling lead to the desired behavior. The key difficulty
is that conventional approaches are "shallow" models that only learn a single
state-action policy. We instead propose a hierarchical policy class that
automatically reasons about both long-term and short-term goals, which we
instantiate as a hierarchical neural network. We showcase our approach in a
case study on learning to imitate demonstrated basketball trajectories, and
show that it generates significantly more realistic trajectories compared to
non-hierarchical baselines as judged by professional sports analysts.Comment: Published in NIPS 201
Batch Policy Learning under Constraints
When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise:
(i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data;
and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints.
We thus study the problem of batch policy learning under multiple constraints,
and offer a systematic solution. We first propose a flexible meta-algorithm
that admits any batch reinforcement learning and online learning procedure as
subroutines. We then present a specific algorithmic instantiation and provide
performance guarantees for the main objective and all constraints. To certify
constraint satisfaction, we propose a new and simple method for off-policy
policy evaluation (OPE) and derive PAC-style bounds. Our algorithm achieves
strong empirical results in different domains, including in a challenging
problem of simulated car driving subject to multiple constraints such as lane
keeping and smooth driving. We also show experimentally that our OPE method
outperforms other popular OPE techniques on a standalone basis, especially in a
high-dimensional setting
Hierarchical Exploration for Accelerating Contextual Bandits
Contextual bandit learning is an increasingly popular approach to optimizing
recommender systems via user feedback, but can be slow to converge in practice
due to the need for exploring a large feature space. In this paper, we propose
a coarse-to-fine hierarchical approach for encoding prior knowledge that
drastically reduces the amount of exploration required. Intuitively, user
preferences can be reasonably embedded in a coarse low-dimensional feature
space that can be explored efficiently, requiring exploration in the
high-dimensional space only as necessary. We introduce a bandit algorithm that
explores within this coarse-to-fine spectrum, and prove performance guarantees
that depend on how well the coarse space captures the user's preferences. We
demonstrate substantial improvement over conventional bandit algorithms through
extensive simulation as well as a live user study in the setting of
personalized news recommendation.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML 2012
A General Large Neighborhood Search Framework for Solving Integer Programs
This paper studies how to design abstractions of large-scale combinatorial optimization problems that can leverage existing state-of-the-art solvers in general purpose ways, and that are amenable to data-driven design. The goal is to arrive at new approaches that can reliably outperform existing solvers in wall-clock time. We focus on solving integer programs, and ground our approach in the large neighborhood search (LNS) paradigm, which iteratively chooses a subset of variables to optimize while leaving the remainder fixed. The appeal of LNS is that it can easily use any existing solver as a subroutine, and thus can inherit the benefits of carefully engineered heuristic approaches and their software implementations. We also show that one can learn a good neighborhood selector from training data. Through an extensive empirical validation, we demonstrate that our LNS framework can significantly outperform, in wall-clock time, compared to state-of-the-art commercial solvers such as Gurobi
Learning recurrent representations for hierarchical behavior modeling
We propose a framework for detecting action patterns from motion sequences
and modeling the sensory-motor relationship of animals, using a generative
recurrent neural network. The network has a discriminative part (classifying
actions) and a generative part (predicting motion), whose recurrent cells are
laterally connected, allowing higher levels of the network to represent high
level phenomena. We test our framework on two types of data, fruit fly behavior
and online handwriting. Our results show that 1) taking advantage of unlabeled
sequences, by predicting future motion, significantly improves action detection
performance when training labels are scarce, 2) the network learns to represent
high level phenomena such as writer identity and fly gender, without
supervision, and 3) simulated motion trajectories, generated by treating motion
prediction as input to the network, look realistic and may be used to
qualitatively evaluate whether the model has learnt generative control rules
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