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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
National Initiatives
ANR BoB
Participant : Michal Valko.
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Title: Bayesian statistics for expensive models and tall data
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Bayesian methods are a popular class of statistical algorithms for updating scientific beliefs. They turn data into decisions and models, taking into account uncertainty about models and their parameters. This makes Bayesian methods popular among applied scientists such as biologists, physicists, or engineers. However, at the heart of Bayesian analysis lie 1) repeated sweeps over the full dataset considered, and 2) repeated evaluations of the model that describes the observed physical process. The current trends to large-scale data collection and complex models thus raises two main issues. Experiments, observations, and numerical simulations in many areas of science nowadays generate terabytes of data, as does the LHC in particle physics for instance. Simultaneously, knowledge creation is becoming more and more data-driven, which requires new paradigms addressing how data are captured, processed, discovered, exchanged, distributed, and analyzed. For statistical algorithms to scale up, reaching a given performance must require as few iterations and as little access to data as possible. It is not only experimental measurements that are growing at a rapid pace. Cell biologists tend to have scarce data but large-scale models of tens of nonlinear differential equations to describe complex dynamics. In such settings, evaluating the model once requires numerically solving a large system of differential equations, which may take minutes for some tens of differential equations on today’s hardware. Iterative statistical processing that requires a million sequential runs of the model is thus out of the question. In this project, we tackle the fundamental cost-accuracy trade-off for Bayesian methods, in order to produce generic inference algorithms that scale favourably with the number of measurements in an experiment and the number of runs of a statistical model. We propose a collection of objectives with different risk-reward trade-offs to tackle these two goals. In particular, for experiments with large numbers of measurements, we further develop existing subsampling-based Monte Carlo methods, while developing a novel decision theory framework that includes data constraints. For expensive models, we build an ambitious programme around Monte Carlo methods that leverage determinantal processes, a rich class of probabilistic tools that lead to accurate inference with limited model evaluations. In short, using innovative techniques such as subsampling-based Monte Carlo and determinantal point processes, we propose in this project to push the boundaries of the applicability of Bayesian inference.
ANR Badass
Participants : Odalric Maillard, Emilie Kaufmann.
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Abstract: Motivated by the fact that a number of modern applications of sequential decision making require developing strategies that are especially robust to change in the stationarity of the signal, and in order to anticipate and impact the next generation of applications of the field, the BADASS project intends to push theory and application of MAB to the next level by incorporating non-stationary observations while retaining near optimality against the best not necessarily constant decision strategy. Since a non-stationary process typically decomposes into chunks associated with some possibly hidden variables (states), each corresponding to a stationary process, handling non-stationarity crucially requires exploiting the (possibly hidden) structure of the decision problem. For the same reason, a MAB for which arms can be arbitrary non-stationary processes is powerful enough to capture MDPs and even partially observable MDPs as special cases, and it is thus important to jointly address the issue of non-stationarity together with that of structure. In order to advance these two nested challenges from a solid theoretical standpoint, we intend to focus on the following objectives: (i) To broaden the range of optimal strategies for stationary MABs: current strategies are only known to be provably optimal in a limited range of scenarios for which the class of distribution (structure) is perfectly known; also, recent heuristics possibly adaptive to the class need to be further analyzed. (ii) To strengthen the literature on pure sequential prediction (focusing on a single arm) for non-stationary signals via the construction of adaptive confidence sets and a novel measure of complexity: traditional approaches consider a worst-case scenario and are thus overly conservative and non-adaptive to simpler signals. (iii) To embed the low-rank matrix completion and spectral methods in the context of reinforcement learning, and further study models of structured environments: promising heuristics in the context of e.g. contextual MABs or Predictive State Representations require stronger theoretical guarantees.
This project will result in the development of a novel generation of strategies to handle non-stationarity and structure that will be evaluated in a number of test beds and validated by a rigorous theoretical analysis. Beyond the significant advancement of the state of the art in MAB and RL theory and the mathematical value of the program, this JCJC BADASS is expected to strategically impact societal and industrial applications, ranging from personalized health-care and e-learning to computational sustainability or rain-adaptive river-bank management to cite a few.
ANR ExTra-Learn
Participants : Alessandro Lazaric, Jérémie Mary, Rémi Munos, Michal Valko.
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Title: Extraction and Transfer of Knowledge in Reinforcement Learning
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Abstract: ExTra-Learn is directly motivated by the evidence that one of the key features that allows humans to accomplish complicated tasks is their ability of building knowledge from past experience and transfer it while learning new tasks. We believe that integrating transfer of learning in machine learning algorithms will dramatically improve their learning performance and enable them to solve complex tasks. We identify in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework the most suitable candidate for this integration. RL formalizes the problem of learning an optimal control policy from the experience directly collected from an unknown environment. Nonetheless, practical limitations of current algorithms encouraged research to focus on how to integrate prior knowledge into the learning process. Although this improves the performance of RL algorithms, it dramatically reduces their autonomy. In this project we pursue a paradigm shift from designing RL algorithms incorporating prior knowledge, to methods able to incrementally discover, construct, and transfer “prior” knowledge in a fully automatic way. More in detail, three main elements of RL algorithms would significantly benefit from transfer of knowledge. (i) For every new task, RL algorithms need exploring the environment for a long time, and this corresponds to slow learning processes for large environments. Transfer learning would enable RL algorithms to dramatically reduce the exploration of each new task by exploiting its resemblance with tasks solved in the past. (ii) RL algorithms evaluate the quality of a policy by computing its state-value function. Whenever the number of states is too large, approximation is needed. Since approximation may cause instability, designing suitable approximation schemes is particularly critical. While this is currently done by a domain expert, we propose to perform this step automatically by constructing features that incrementally adapt to the tasks encountered over time. This would significantly reduce human supervision and increase the accuracy and stability of RL algorithms across different tasks. (iii) In order to deal with complex environments, hierarchical RL solutions have been proposed, where state representations and policies are organized over a hierarchy of subtasks. This requires a careful definition of the hierarchy, which, if not properly constructed, may lead to very poor learning performance. The ambitious goal of transfer learning is to automatically construct a hierarchy of skills, which can be effectively reused over a wide range of similar tasks.
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Activity Report: Research in ExTra-Learn continued in investigating how knowledge can be transferred into reinforcement learning algorithms to improve their performance. Pierre-Victor Chaumier did a 4 months internship in SequeL studying how to perform transfer neural networks across different games in the Atari platform. Unfortunately, the preliminary results we obtained were not very positive. We investigated different transfer models, from basic transfer of a fully trained network, to co-train over multiple games and retrain with initialization from a previous network. In most of the cases, the improvement from transfer was rather limited and in some cases even negative transfer effects appeared. This seems to be intrinsic in the neural network architecture which tends to overfit on one single task and it poorly generlizes over alternative tasks. Another activity was related to the study of macro-actions in RL. We proved for the first time under which conditions macro-actions can actually improve the learning speed of an RL exploration-exploitation algorithm. This is the first step towards the automatic identification and construction of useful macro-actions across multiple tasks.
ANR KEHATH
Participant : Olivier Pietquin.
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Title: Advanced Quality Methods for Post-Edition of Machine Translation
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Other partners: Univ. Lille 1, Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (LIG)
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Abstract: The translation community has seen a major change over the last five years. Thanks to progress in the training of statistical machine translation engines on corpora of existing translations, machine translation has become good enough so that it has become advantageous for translators to post-edit machine outputs rather than translate from scratch. However, current enhancement of machine translation (MT) systems from human post-edition (PE) are rather basic: the post-edited output is added to the training corpus and the translation model and language model are re-trained, with no clear view of how much has been improved and how much is left to be improved. Moreover, the final PE result is the only feedback used: available technologies do not take advantages of logged sequences of post-edition actions, which inform on the cognitive processes of the post-editor. The KEHATH project intends to address these issues in two ways. Firstly, we will optimise advanced machine learning techniques in the MT+PE loop. Our goal is to boost the impact of PE, that is, reach the same performance with less PE or better performance with the same amount of PE. In other words, we want to improve machine translation learning curves. For this purpose, active learning and reinforcement learning techniques will be proposed and evaluated. Along with this, we will have to face challenges such as MT systems heterogeneity (statistical and/or rule-based), and ML scalability so as to improve domain-specific MT. Secondly, since quality prediction (QP) on MT outputs is crucial for translation project managers, we will implement and evaluate in real-world conditions several confidence estimation and error detection techniques previously developed at a laboratory scale. A shared concern will be to work on continuous domain-specific data flows to improve both MT and the performance of indicators for quality prediction. The overall goal of the KEHATH project is straightforward: gain additional machine translation performance as fast as possible in each and every new industrial translation project, so that post-edition time and cost is drastically reduced. Basic research is the best way to reach this goal, for an industrial impact that is powerful and immediate.
ANR MaRDi
Participants : Olivier Pietquin, Bilal Piot.
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Other partners: Laboratoire d'Informatique d'Avignon (LIA), CNRS - LAAS (Toulouse), Acapela group (Toulouse)
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Abstract: In the MaRDi project, we study the interaction between humans and machines as a situated problem in which human users and machines share the same environment. Especially, we investigate how the physical environment of robots interacting with humans can be used to improve the performance of spoken interaction which is known to be imperfect and sensible to noise. To achieve this objectif, we study three main problems. First, how to interactively build a multimodal representation of the current dialogue context from perception and proprioception signals. Second, how to automatically learn a strategy of interaction using methods such as reinforcement learning. Third, how to provide expressive feedbacks to users about how the machine is confident about its behaviour and to reflect its current state (also the physical state).
National Partners
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J.Perolat, B.Piot and O.Pietquin worked with Bruno Scherrer on Stochastic Games. It led to a conference publication in AISTATS 2016 [47] and ICML 2016.
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