Imperfect also Deserves Reward: Multi-Level and Sequential Reward Modeling for Better Dialog Management
Zhengxu Hou
Ruihui Zhao
Zijing Ou
Yafei Liu
X. T. Chen
Yefeng Zheng
For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency a… (see more)nd slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL. To solve this problem, many strategies have been proposed to give proper rewards when training RL, but their rewards lack interpretability and cannot accurately estimate the distribution of state-action pairs in real dialogs. In this paper, we propose a multi-level reward modeling approach that factorizes a reward into a three-level hierarchy: domain, act, and slot. Based on inverse adversarial reinforcement learning, our designed reward model can provide more accurate and explainable reward signals for state-action pairs. Extensive evaluations show that our approach can be applied to a wide range of reinforcement learning-based dialog systems and significantly improves both the performance and the speed of convergence.
Modeling Event Plausibility with Consistent Conceptual Abstraction
Ian Porada
Kaheer Suleman
Adam Trischler
Understanding by Understanding Not: Modeling Negation in Language Models
Negation is a core construction in natural language. Despite being very successful on many tasks, state-of-the-art pre-trained language mode… (see more)ls often handle negation incorrectly. To improve language models in this regard, we propose to augment the language modeling objective with an unlikelihood objective that is based on negated generic sentences from a raw text corpus. By training BERT with the resulting combined objective we reduce the mean top 1 error rate to 4% on the negated LAMA dataset. We also see some improvements on the negated NLI benchmarks.
On the benefits of representation regularization in invariance based domain generalization
Changjian Shui
Boyu Wang
Gotta Go Fast When Generating Data with Score-Based Models
Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau
Fei Li
Rémi Piché-Taillefer
Tal Kachman
Score-based (denoising diffusion) generative models have recently gained a lot of success in generating realistic and diverse data. These ap… (see more)proaches define a forward diffusion process for transforming data to noise and generate data by reversing it (thereby going from noise to data). Unfortunately, current score-based models generate data very slowly due to the sheer number of score network evaluations required by numerical SDE solvers. In this work, we aim to accelerate this process by devising a more efficient SDE solver. Existing approaches rely on the Euler-Maruyama (EM) solver, which uses a fixed step size. We found that naively replacing it with other SDE solvers fares poorly - they either result in low-quality samples or become slower than EM. To get around this issue, we carefully devise an SDE solver with adaptive step sizes tailored to score-based generative models piece by piece. Our solver requires only two score function evaluations, rarely rejects samples, and leads to high-quality samples. Our approach generates data 2 to 10 times faster than EM while achieving better or equal sample quality. For high-resolution images, our method leads to significantly higher quality samples than all other methods tested. Our SDE solver has the benefit of requiring no step size tuning.
Noised Consistency Training for Text Summarization
J. Y. Liu
Qianren Mao
Hao Peng
Hongdong Zhu
Jian-Xin Li
Neural abstractive summarization methods often require large quantities of labeled training data. However, labeling large amounts of summari… (see more)zation data is often prohibitive due to time, financial, and expertise constraints, which has limited the usefulness of summarization systems to practical applications. In this paper, we argue that this limitation can be overcome by a semi-supervised approach: consistency training which is to leverage large amounts of unlabeled data to improve the performance of supervised learning over a small corpus. The consistency regularization semi-supervised learning can regularize model predictions to be invariant to small noise applied to input articles. By adding noised unlabeled corpus to help regularize consistency training, this framework obtains comparative performance without using the full dataset. In particular, we have verified that leveraging large amounts of unlabeled data decently improves the performance of supervised learning over an insufficient labeled dataset.
AndroidEnv: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Android
Daniel Toyama
Philippe Hamel
Anita Gergely
Gheorghe Comanici
Amelia Glaese
Zafarali Ahmed
Tyler Jackson
Shibl Mourad
We introduce AndroidEnv, an open-source platform for Reinforcement Learning (RL) research built on top of the Android ecosystem. AndroidEnv … (see more)allows RL agents to interact with a wide variety of apps and services commonly used by humans through a universal touchscreen interface. Since agents train on a realistic simulation of an Android device, they have the potential to be deployed on real devices. In this report, we give an overview of the environment, highlighting the significant features it provides for research, and we present an empirical evaluation of some popular reinforcement learning agents on a set of tasks built on this platform.
Learning Brain Dynamics With Coupled Low-Dimensional Nonlinear Oscillators and Deep Recurrent Networks
Germán Abrevaya
Aleksandr Y. Aravkin
Peng Zheng
Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet
James Kozloski
Pablo Polosecki
David Cox
Silvina Ponce Dawson
Guillermo Cecchi
Many natural systems, especially biological ones, exhibit complex multivariate nonlinear dynamical behaviors that can be hard to capture by … (see more)linear autoregressive models. On the other hand, generic nonlinear models such as deep recurrent neural networks often require large amounts of training data, not always available in domains such as brain imaging; also, they often lack interpretability. Domain knowledge about the types of dynamics typically observed in such systems, such as a certain type of dynamical systems models, could complement purely data-driven techniques by providing a good prior. In this work, we consider a class of ordinary differential equation (ODE) models known as van der Pol (VDP) oscil lators and evaluate their ability to capture a low-dimensional representation of neural activity measured by different brain imaging modalities, such as calcium imaging (CaI) and fMRI, in different living organisms: larval zebrafish, rat, and human. We develop a novel and efficient approach to the nontrivial problem of parameters estimation for a network of coupled dynamical systems from multivariate data and demonstrate that the resulting VDP models are both accurate and interpretable, as VDP's coupling matrix reveals anatomically meaningful excitatory and inhibitory interactions across different brain subsystems. VDP outperforms linear autoregressive models (VAR) in terms of both the data fit accuracy and the quality of insight provided by the coupling matrices and often tends to generalize better to unseen data when predicting future brain activity, being comparable to and sometimes better than the recurrent neural networks (LSTMs). Finally, we demonstrate that our (generative) VDP model can also serve as a data-augmentation tool leading to marked improvements in predictive accuracy of recurrent neural networks. Thus, our work contributes to both basic and applied dimensions of neuroimaging: gaining scientific insights and improving brain-based predictive models, an area of potentially high practical importance in clinical diagnosis and neurotechnology.
Inferring global-scale temporal latent topics from news reports to predict public health interventions for COVID-19
Zhi Wen
Guido Powell
Imane Chafi
Y. K. Li
Generative lesion pattern decomposition of cognitive impairment after stroke
Anna K. Bonkhoff
Jae‐Sung Lim
Hee-Joon Bae
Nick A. Weaver
Hugo J. Kuijf
J. Matthijs Biesbroek
Natalia S Rost
Cognitive impairment is a frequent and disabling sequela of stroke. There is however incomplete understanding of how lesion topographies in … (see more)the left and right cerebral hemisphere brain interact to cause distinct cognitive deficits. We integrated machine learning and Bayesian hierarchical modeling to enable hemisphere-aware analysis of 1080 subacute ischemic stroke patients with deep profiling ∼3 months after stroke. We show relevance of the left hemisphere in the prediction of language and memory assessments, while global cognitive impairments were equally well predicted by lesion topographies from both sides. Damage to the hippocampal and occipital regions on the left were particularly informative about lost naming and memory function. Global cognitive impairment was predominantly linked to lesioned tissue in supramarginal and angular gyrus, the postcentral gyrus as well as the lateral occipital and opercular cortices of the left hemisphere. Hence, our analysis strategy uncovered that lesion patterns with unique hemispheric distributions are characteristic of how cognitive capacity is lost due to ischemic brain tissue damage.
Publisher Correction: The default network of the human brain is associated with perceived social isolation
R. Nathan Spreng
Emile Dimas
Laetitia Mwilambwe-Tshilobo
Alain Dagher
Philipp Koellinger
Gideon Nave
Anthony Ong
Julius M Kernbach
Thomas V. Wiecki
Tian Ge
Avram J. Holmes
B.T. Thomas Yeo
Gary R. Turner
Robin I. M. Dunbar
Artificial intelligence in nursing: Priorities and opportunities from an international invitational think‐tank of the Nursing and Artificial Intelligence Leadership Collaborative
Charlene Esteban Ronquillo
Laura‐Maria Peltonen
Lisiane Pruinelli
Charlene H Chu
Suzanne Bakken
Ana Beduschi
Kenrick Cato
Nicholas Hardiker
Alain Junger
Martin Michalowski
Rune Nyrup
Donald Nigel Reed
Tapio Salakoski
Sanna Salanterä
Nancy Walton
Patrick Weber
Thomas Wiegand
Maxim Topaz