Publications

Neural Architecture Search for Class-incremental Learning
Shenyang Huang
Vincent Francois-Lavet
Guillaume Rabusseau
In class-incremental learning, a model learns continuously from a sequential data stream in which new classes occur. Existing methods often … (see more)rely on static architectures that are manually crafted. These methods can be prone to capacity saturation because a neural network's ability to generalize to new concepts is limited by its fixed capacity. To understand how to expand a continual learner, we focus on the neural architecture design problem in the context of class-incremental learning: at each time step, the learner must optimize its performance on all classes observed so far by selecting the most competitive neural architecture. To tackle this problem, we propose Continual Neural Architecture Search (CNAS): an autoML approach that takes advantage of the sequential nature of class-incremental learning to efficiently and adaptively identify strong architectures in a continual learning setting. We employ a task network to perform the classification task and a reinforcement learning agent as the meta-controller for architecture search. In addition, we apply network transformations to transfer weights from previous learning step and to reduce the size of the architecture search space, thus saving a large amount of computational resources. We evaluate CNAS on the CIFAR-100 dataset under varied incremental learning scenarios with limited computational power (1 GPU). Experimental results demonstrate that CNAS outperforms architectures that are optimized for the entire dataset. In addition, CNAS is at least an order of magnitude more efficient than naively using existing autoML methods.
2019-09-14
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Recognizable series on graphs and hypergraphs
Raphaël Bailly
Guillaume Rabusseau
François Denis
2019-09-01
Journal of Computer and System Sciences (published)
doi.org
Teaching Modelling Literacy: An Artificial Intelligence Approach
Rijul Saini
Gunter Mussbacher
Jin Guo
Jörg Kienzle
In Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), models are used to build and analyze complex systems. In the last decades, different modelling formalisms… (see more) have been proposed for supporting software development. However, their adoption and practice strongly rely on mastering essential modelling skills to develop a complete and coherent model-based system. Moreover, it is often difficult for novice modellers to get direct and timely feedback and recommendations on their modelling strategies and decisions, particularly in large classroom settings which hinders their learning. Certainly, there is an opportunity to apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to an MDE learning environment to empower the provisioning of automated and intelligent modelling advocacy. In this paper, we propose a framework called ModBud (a modelling buddy) to educate novice modellers about the art of abstraction. ModBud uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to create modelling bots with the aim of improving the modelling skills of novice modellers and assisting other practitioners, too. These bots could be used to support teaching with automatic creation or grading of models and enhance learning beyond the traditional classroom-based MDE education with timely feedback and personalized tutoring. Research challenges for the proposed framework are discussed and a research roadmap is presented.
2019-09-01
2019 ACM/IEEE 22nd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C) (published)
doi.org
Online Continual Learning with Maximally Interfered Retrieval
Rahaf Aljundi
Lucas Caccia
Eugene Belilovsky
Massimo Caccia
Min Lin
Laurent Charlin
Tinne Tuytelaars
Continual learning, the setting where a learning agent is faced with a never ending stream of data, continues to be a great challenge for mo… (see more)dern machine learning systems. In particular the online or "single-pass through the data" setting has gained attention recently as a natural setting that is difficult to tackle. Methods based on replay, either generative or from a stored memory, have been shown to be effective approaches for continual learning, matching or exceeding the state of the art in a number of standard benchmarks. These approaches typically rely on randomly selecting samples from the replay memory or from a generative model, which is suboptimal. In this work, we consider a controlled sampling of memories for replay. We retrieve the samples which are most interfered, i.e. whose prediction will be most negatively impacted by the foreseen parameters update. We show a formulation for this sampling criterion in both the generative replay and the experience replay setting, producing consistent gains in performance and greatly reduced forgetting. We release an implementation of our method at this https URL.
2019-08-11
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
An Atari Model Zoo for Analyzing, Visualizing, and Comparing Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents
Felipe Petroski Such
Vashisht Madhavan
Rosanne Liu
Rui Wang
Pablo Samuel Castro
Yulun Li
Jiale Zhi
Ludwig Schubert
Marc Gendron-Bellemare
Jeff Clune
Joel Lehman
Much human and computational effort has aimed to improve how deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms perform on benchmarks such as the … (see more)Atari Learning Environment. Comparatively less effort has focused on understanding what has been learned by such methods, and investigating and comparing the representations learned by different families of DRL algorithms. Sources of friction include the onerous computational requirements, and general logistical and architectural complications for running DRL algorithms at scale. We lessen this friction, by (1) training several algorithms at scale and releasing trained models, (2) integrating with a previous DRL model release, and (3) releasing code that makes it easy for anyone to load, visualize, and analyze such models. This paper introduces the Atari Zoo framework, which contains models trained across benchmark Atari games, in an easy-to-use format, as well as code that implements common modes of analysis and connects such models to a popular neural network visualization library. Further, to demonstrate the potential of this dataset and software package, we show initial quantitative and qualitative comparisons between the performance and representations of several DRL algorithms, highlighting interesting and previously unknown distinctions between them.
2019-08-10
Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Interpolation Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Learning
Vikas Verma
Kenji Kawaguchi
Alex Lamb
Juho Kannala
Yoshua Bengio
David Lopez-Paz
Arno Solin
2019-08-10
Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
A principled approach for generating adversarial images under non-smooth dissimilarity metrics
Aram-Alexandre Pooladian
Chris J. Finlay
Tim Hoheisel
Adam M. Oberman
Deep neural networks perform well on real world data but are prone to adversarial perturbations: small changes in the input easily lead to m… (see more)isclassification. In this work, we propose an attack methodology not only for cases where the perturbations are measured by
2019-08-05
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
A Comparative Analysis of Expected and Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Clare Lyle
Pablo Samuel Castro
Marc Gendron-Bellemare
Since their introduction a year ago, distributional approaches to reinforcement learning (distributional RL) have produced strong results re… (see more)lative to the standard approach which models expected values (expected RL). However, aside from convergence guarantees, there have been few theoretical results investigating the reasons behind the improvements distributional RL provides. In this paper we begin the investigation into this fundamental question by analyzing the differences in the tabular, linear approximation, and non-linear approximation settings. We prove that in many realizations of the tabular and linear approximation settings, distributional RL behaves exactly the same as expected RL. In cases where the two methods behave differently, distributional RL can in fact hurt performance when it does not induce identical behaviour. We then continue with an empirical analysis comparing distributional and expected RL methods in control settings with non-linear approximators to tease apart where the improvements from distributional RL methods are coming from.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Contextualized Non-local Neural Networks for Sequence Learning
Pengfei Liu
Shuaichen Chang
Xuanjing Huang
Jian Tang
Jackie Cheung
Recently, a large number of neural mechanisms and models have been proposed for sequence learning, of which selfattention, as exemplified by… (see more) the Transformer model, and graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted much attention. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines and draws on the complementary strengths of these two methods. Specifically, we propose contextualized non-local neural networks (CN3), which can both dynamically construct a task-specific structure of a sentence and leverage rich local dependencies within a particular neighbourhood.Experimental results on ten NLP tasks in text classification, semantic matching, and sequence labelling show that our proposed model outperforms competitive baselines and discovers task-specific dependency structures, thus providing better interpretability to users.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Generating Character Descriptions for Automatic Summarization of Fiction
Weiwei Zhang
Jackie Cheung
J. Oren
Summaries of fictional stories allow readers to quickly decide whether or not a story catches their interest. A major challenge in automatic… (see more) summarization of fiction is the lack of standardized evaluation methodology or high-quality datasets for experimentation. In this work, we take a bottomup approach to this problem by assuming that story authors are uniquely qualified to inform such decisions. We collect a dataset of one million fiction stories with accompanying author-written summaries from Wattpad, an online story sharing platform. We identify commonly occurring summary components, of which a description of the main characters is the most frequent, and elicit descriptions of main characters directly from the authors for a sample of the stories. We propose two approaches to generate character descriptions, one based on ranking attributes found in the story text, the other based on classifying into a list of pre-defined attributes. We find that the classification-based approach performs the best in predicting character descriptions.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
Learning Multi-Task Communication with Message Passing for Sequence Learning
Pengfei Liu
Jie Fu
Yue Dong
Xipeng Qiu
Jackie Cheung
We present two architectures for multi-task learning with neural sequence models. Our approach allows the relationships between different ta… (see more)sks to be learned dynamically, rather than using an ad-hoc pre-defined structure as in previous work. We adopt the idea from message-passing graph neural networks, and propose a general graph multi-task learning framework in which different tasks can communicate with each other in an effective and interpretable way. We conduct extensive experiments in text classification and sequence labelling to evaluate our approach on multi-task learning and transfer learning. The empirical results show that our models not only outperform competitive baselines, but also learn interpretable and transferable patterns across tasks.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
Learning Options with Interest Functions
Khimya Khetarpal
Doina Precup
Learning temporal abstractions which are partial solutions to a task and could be reused for solving other tasks is an ingredient that can h… (see more)elp agents to plan and learn efficiently. In this work, we tackle this problem in the options framework. We aim to autonomously learn options which are specialized in different state space regions by proposing a notion of interest functions, which generalizes initiation sets from the options framework for function approximation. We build on the option-critic framework to derive policy gradient theorems for interest functions, leading to a new interest-option-critic architecture.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org