When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features into a single objective. If they try to do both at once from input designed to teach the full reward function, it is easy to end up with a representation that contains spurious correlations in the data, which fails to generalize to new settings. Instead, our ultimate goal is to enable robots to identify and isolate the causal features that people actually care about and use when they represent states and behavior. Our idea is that we can tune into this representation by asking users what behaviors they consider similar: behaviors will be similar if the features that matter are similar, even if low-level behavior is different; conversely, behaviors will be different if even one of the features that matter differs. This, in turn, is what enables the robot to disambiguate between what needs to go into the representation versus what is spurious, as well as what aspects of behavior can be compressed together versus not. The notion of learning representations based on similarity has a nice parallel in contrastive learning, a self-supervised representation learning technique that maps visually similar data points to similar embeddings, where similarity is defined by a designer through data augmentation heuristics. By contrast, in order to learn the representations that people use, so we can learn their preferences and objectives, we use their definition of similarity. In simulation as well as in a user study, we show that learning through such similarity queries leads to representations that, while far from perfect, are indeed more generalizable than self-supervised and task-input alternatives.

一些研究人员推测智能强化学习（RL）代理商将被激励寻求资源和追求目标的权力。其他研究人员指出，RL代理商不需要具有人类的寻求技能本能。为了澄清这一讨论，我们开展了最优政策统计趋势的第一个正式理论。在马尔可夫决策过程的背景下，我们证明某些环境对称是足以实现对环境寻求权力的最佳政策。这些对称存在于许多环境中，其中代理可以关闭或销毁。我们证明，在这些环境中，大多数奖励功能使其通过保持一系列可用的选项来寻求电力，并在最大限度地提高平均奖励时，通过导航到更大的潜在终端状态。

We address the problem of extracting key steps from unlabeled procedural videos, motivated by the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) headsets to revolutionize job training and performance. We decompose the problem into two steps: representation learning and key steps extraction. We employ self-supervised representation learning via a training strategy that adapts off-the-shelf video features using a temporal module. Training implements self-supervised learning losses involving multiple cues such as appearance, motion and pose trajectories extracted from videos to learn generalizable representations. Our method extracts key steps via a tunable algorithm that clusters the representations extracted from procedural videos. We quantitatively evaluate our approach with key step localization and also demonstrate the effectiveness of the extracted representations on related downstream tasks like phase classification. Qualitative results demonstrate that the extracted key steps are meaningful to succinctly represent the procedural tasks.

An oft-cited open problem of federated learning is the existence of data heterogeneity at the clients. One pathway to understanding the drastic accuracy drop in federated learning is by scrutinizing the behavior of the clients' deep models on data with different levels of "difficulty", which has been left unaddressed. In this paper, we investigate a different and rarely studied dimension of FL: ordered learning. Specifically, we aim to investigate how ordered learning principles can contribute to alleviating the heterogeneity effects in FL. We present theoretical analysis and conduct extensive empirical studies on the efficacy of orderings spanning three kinds of learning: curriculum, anti-curriculum, and random curriculum. We find that curriculum learning largely alleviates non-IIDness. Interestingly, the more disparate the data distributions across clients the more they benefit from ordered learning. We provide analysis explaining this phenomenon, specifically indicating how curriculum training appears to make the objective landscape progressively less convex, suggesting fast converging iterations at the beginning of the training procedure. We derive quantitative results of convergence for both convex and nonconvex objectives by modeling the curriculum training on federated devices as local SGD with locally biased stochastic gradients. Also, inspired by ordered learning, we propose a novel client selection technique that benefits from the real-world disparity in the clients. Our proposed approach to client selection has a synergic effect when applied together with ordered learning in FL.

This paper tackles the challenging problem of automating code updates to fix deprecated API usages of open source libraries by analyzing their release notes. Our system employs a three-tier architecture: first, a web crawler service retrieves deprecation documentation from the web; then a specially built parser processes those text documents into tree-structured representations; finally, a client IDE plugin locates and fixes identified deprecated usages of libraries in a given codebase. The focus of this paper in particular is the parsing component. We introduce a novel transition-based parser in two variants: based on a classical feature engineered classifier and a neural tree encoder. To confirm the effectiveness of our method, we gathered and labeled a set of 426 API deprecations from 7 well-known Python data science libraries, and demonstrated our approach decisively outperforms a non-trivial neural machine translation baseline.

Using a comprehensive sample of 2,585 bankruptcies from 1990 to 2019, we benchmark the performance of various machine learning models in predicting financial distress of publicly traded U.S. firms. We find that gradient boosted trees outperform other models in one-year-ahead forecasts. Variable permutation tests show that excess stock returns, idiosyncratic risk, and relative size are the more important variables for predictions. Textual features derived from corporate filings do not improve performance materially. In a credit competition model that accounts for the asymmetric cost of default misclassification, the survival random forest is able to capture large dollar profits.

Tensor robust principal component analysis (RPCA), which seeks to separate a low-rank tensor from its sparse corruptions, has been crucial in data science and machine learning where tensor structures are becoming more prevalent. While powerful, existing tensor RPCA algorithms can be difficult to use in practice, as their performance can be sensitive to the choice of additional hyperparameters, which are not straightforward to tune. In this paper, we describe a fast and simple self-supervised model for tensor RPCA using deep unfolding by only learning four hyperparameters. Despite its simplicity, our model expunges the need for ground truth labels while maintaining competitive or even greater performance compared to supervised deep unfolding. Furthermore, our model is capable of operating in extreme data-starved scenarios. We demonstrate these claims on a mix of synthetic data and real-world tasks, comparing performance against previously studied supervised deep unfolding methods and Bayesian optimization baselines.

Reinforcement learning can enable robots to navigate to distant goals while optimizing user-specified reward functions, including preferences for following lanes, staying on paved paths, or avoiding freshly mowed grass. However, online learning from trial-and-error for real-world robots is logistically challenging, and methods that instead can utilize existing datasets of robotic navigation data could be significantly more scalable and enable broader generalization. In this paper, we present ReViND, the first offline RL system for robotic navigation that can leverage previously collected data to optimize user-specified reward functions in the real-world. We evaluate our system for off-road navigation without any additional data collection or fine-tuning, and show that it can navigate to distant goals using only offline training from this dataset, and exhibit behaviors that qualitatively differ based on the user-specified reward function.

Modern virtual assistants use internal semantic parsing engines to convert user utterances to actionable commands. However, prior work has demonstrated that semantic parsing is a difficult multilingual transfer task with low transfer efficiency compared to other tasks. In global markets such as India and Latin America, this is a critical issue as switching between languages is prevalent for bilingual users. In this work we dramatically improve the zero-shot performance of a multilingual and codeswitched semantic parsing system using two stages of multilingual alignment. First, we show that constrastive alignment pretraining improves both English performance and transfer efficiency. We then introduce a constrained optimization approach for hyperparameter-free adversarial alignment during finetuning. Our Doubly Aligned Multilingual Parser (DAMP) improves mBERT transfer performance by 3x, 6x, and 81x on the Spanglish, Hinglish and Multilingual Task Oriented Parsing benchmarks respectively and outperforms XLM-R and mT5-Large using 3.2x fewer parameters.

Navigation is one of the most heavily studied problems in robotics, and is conventionally approached as a geometric mapping and planning problem. However, real-world navigation presents a complex set of physical challenges that defies simple geometric abstractions. Machine learning offers a promising way to go beyond geometry and conventional planning, allowing for navigational systems that make decisions based on actual prior experience. Such systems can reason about traversability in ways that go beyond geometry, accounting for the physical outcomes of their actions and exploiting patterns in real-world environments. They can also improve as more data is collected, potentially providing a powerful network effect. In this article, we present a general toolkit for experiential learning of robotic navigation skills that unifies several recent approaches, describe the underlying design principles, summarize experimental results from several of our recent papers, and discuss open problems and directions for future work.