Publications

Probabilistic surrogate networks for simulators with unbounded randomness
Andreas Munk
Berend Zwartsenberg
Adam Ścibior
Atilim Güneş Baydin
Andrew Lawrence Stewart
Goran Fernlund
Anoush Poursartip
We present a framework for automatically structuring and training fast, approximate, deep neural surrogates of stochastic simulators. Unlike… (see more) traditional approaches to surrogate modeling, our surrogates retain the interpretable structure and control flow of the reference simulator. Our surrogates target stochastic simulators where the number of random variables itself can be stochastic and potentially unbounded. Our framework further enables an automatic replacement of the reference simulator with the surrogate when undertaking amortized inference. The fidelity and speed of our surrogates allow for both faster stochastic simulation and accurate and substantially faster posterior inference. Using an illustrative yet non-trivial example we show our surrogates' ability to accurately model a probabilistic program with an unbounded number of random variables. We then proceed with an example that shows our surrogates are able to accurately model a complex structure like an unbounded stack in a program synthesis example. We further demonstrate how our surrogate modeling technique makes amortized inference in complex black-box simulators an order of magnitude faster. Specifically, we do simulator-based materials quality testing, inferring safety-critical latent internal temperature profiles of composite materials undergoing curing.
Question Personalization in an Intelligent Tutoring System
Sabina Elkins
Robert Belfer
Ekaterina Kochmar
Iulian V. Serban
Realistic Evaluation of Transductive Few-Shot Learning - Supplementary Material
Olivier Veilleux
Éts Montréal
Malik Boudiaf
Ismail Ben
Ayed Éts Montreal
In the main tables of the paper, we did not include the performances of α-TIM in the standard balanced setting. Here, we emphasize that α-… (see more)TIM is a generalization of TIM [1] as when α → 1 (i.e., the α-entropies tend to the Shannon entropies), α-TIM tends to TIM. Therefore, in the standard setting, where optimal hyper-parameter α is obtained over validation tasks that are balanced (as in the standard validation tasks of the original TIM and the other existing methods), the performance of α-TIM is the same as TIM. When α is tuned on balanced validation tasks, we obtain an optimal value of α very close to 1, and our α-mutual information approaches the standard mutual information. When the validation tasks are uniformly random, as in our new setting and in the validation plots we provided in the main figure, one can see that the performance of α-TIM remains competitive when we tend to balanced testing tasks (i.e., when a is increasing), but is significantly better than TIM when we tend to uniformly-random testing tasks (a = 1). These results illustrate the flexibility of α-divergences, and are in line with the technical analysis provided in the main paper.
Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer
Ladislav Rampášek
Mikhail Galkin
Vijay Prakash Dwivedi
Anh Tuan Luu
We propose a recipe on how to build a general, powerful, scalable (GPS) graph Transformer with linear complexity and state-of-the-art result… (see more)s on a diverse set of benchmarks. Graph Transformers (GTs) have gained popularity in the field of graph representation learning with a variety of recent publications but they lack a common foundation about what constitutes a good positional or structural encoding, and what differentiates them. In this paper, we summarize the different types of encodings with a clearer definition and categorize them as being
Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning: Reusing Prior Computation to Accelerate Progress
Representational ethical model calibration
Robert Carruthers
Isabel Straw
James K. Ruffle
Daniel Herron
Amy Nelson
Delmiro Fernandez-Reyes
Geraint Rees
Parashkev Nachev
Robust Policy Learning over Multiple Uncertainty Sets
Annie Xie
Shagun Sodhani
Chelsea Finn
Amy Zhang
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods prov… (see more)ide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast identification is not possible. Another dominant approach is robust RL which produces a policy that can handle worst-case scenarios, but these methods are generally designed to achieve robustness to a single uncertainty set that must be specified at train time. Towards a more general solution, we formulate the multi-set robustness problem to learn a policy robust to different perturbation sets. We then design an algorithm that enjoys the benefits of both system identification and robust RL: it reduces uncertainty where possible given a few interactions, but can still act robustly with respect to the remaining uncertainty. On a diverse set of control tasks, our approach demonstrates improved worst-case performance on new environments compared to prior methods based on system identification and on robust RL alone.
Robustness of Whittle Index Policy to Model Approximation
Amit Sinha
Scalable Operator Allocation for Multirobot Assistance: A Restless Bandit Approach
Abhinav Dahiya
Nima Akbarzadeh
Stephen L. Smith
In this article, we consider the problem of allocating human operators in a system with multiple semiautonomous robots. Each robot is requir… (see more)ed to perform an independent sequence of tasks, subject to a chance of failing and getting stuck in a fault state at every task. If and when required, a human operator can assist or teleoperate a robot. Conventional dynamic programming-based techniques used to solve such problems face scalability issues due to an exponential growth of state and action spaces with the number of robots and operators. In this article, we derive conditions under which the operator allocation problem satisfies a technical condition called indexability, thereby enabling the use of the Whittle index heuristic. The conditions are easy to check, and we show that they hold for a wide range of problems of interest. Our key insight is to leverage the structure of the value function of individual robots, resulting in conditions that can be verified separately for each state of each robot. We apply these conditions to two types of transitions commonly seen in remote robot supervision systems. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate the efficacy of Whittle index policy as a near-optimal and scalable approach that outperforms existing scalable methods.
Scaling the Number of Tasks in Continual Learning
Timothee LESORT
Oleksiy Ostapenko
Diganta Misra
Md Rifat Arefin
Pau Rodriguez
Sociotechnical Harms: Scoping a Taxonomy for Harm Reduction
Renee Shelby
Shalaleh Rismani
Kathryn Henne
Paul Nicholas
N'mah Fodiatu Yilla
Jess Gallegos
Andrew J Smart
Emilio Garcia
Gurleen Virk
Source-summary Entity Aggregation in Abstractive Summarization.
José-ángel González
Annie Priyadarshini Louis