In this work we introduce the application of black-box quantum control as an interesting rein- forcement learning problem to the machine learning community. We analyze the structure of the reinforcement learning problems arising in quantum physics and argue that agents parameterized by long short-term memory (LSTM) networks trained via stochastic policy gradients yield a general method to solving them. In this context we introduce a variant of the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm called the memory proximal policy optimization (MPPO) which is based on this analysis. We then show how it can be applied to specific learning tasks and present results of nu- merical experiments showing that our method achieves state-of-the-art results for several learning tasks in quantum control with discrete and continouous control parameters.
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a highly popular model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approach. However, we observe that in a continuous action space, PPO can prematurely shrink the exploration variance, which leads to slow progress and may make the algorithm prone to getting stuck in local optima. Drawing inspiration from CMA-ES, a black-box evolutionary optimization method designed for robustness in similar situations, we propose PPO-CMA, a proximal policy optimization approach that adaptively expands the exploration variance to speed up progress. With only minor changes to PPO, our …
Interpretability methods for neural networks are difficult to evaluate because we do not understand the black-box models typically used to test them. This paper proposes a framework in which interpretability methods are evaluated using manually constructed networks, which we call white-box networks, whose behavior is understood a priori. We evaluate five methods for producing attribution heatmaps by applying them to white-box LSTM classifiers for tasks based on formal languages. Although our white-box classifiers solve their tasks perfectly and transparently, we find that all five attribution …
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)（韩国电子通信研究院）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
In replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy resources for carbon neutrality, the unbalanced resource production of intermittent wind and photovoltaic (PV) power is a critical issue for peer-to-peer (P2P) power trading. To address this issue, a reinforcement learning (RL) technique is introduced in this paper. For RL, a graph convolutional network (GCN) and a bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network are jointly applied to P2P power trading between nanogrid clusters, based on cooperative game theory. The flexible and reliable DC nanogrid is suitable for integrating renewable e…
Northeast Electric Power University（东北电力大学）；Hanyang University（汉阳大学）
The emerging cryptocurrency market has lately received great attention for asset allocation due to its decentralization uniqueness. However, its volatility and brand new trading mode have made it challenging to devising an acceptable automatically-generating strategy. This study proposes a framework for automatic high-frequency bitcoin transactions based on a deep reinforcement learning algorithm-proximal policy optimization (PPO). The framework creatively regards the transaction process as actions, returns as awards and prices as states to align with the idea of reinforcement learning. It com…
Modern decision-making in fixed income asset management benefits from intelligent systems, which involve the use of state-of-the-art machine learning models and appropriate methodologies. We conduct the first study of bond yield forecasting using long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, validating its potential and identifying its memory advantage. Specifically, we model the 10-year bond yield using univariate LSTMs with three input sequences and five forecasting horizons. We compare those with multilayer perceptrons (MLP), univariate and with the most relevant features. To demystify the notion…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
We present Mean Box Pooling, a novel visual representation that pools over CNN representations of a large number, highly overlapping object proposals. We show that such representation together with nCCA, a successful multimodal embedding technique, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Visual Madlibs task. Moreover, inspired by the nCCA's objective function, we extend classical CNN+LSTM approach to train the network by directly maximizing the similarity between the internal representation of the deep learning architecture and candidate answers. Again, such approach achieves a significan…
With deep learning approaches becoming state-of-the-art in many speech (as well as non-speech) related machine learning tasks, efforts are being taken to delve into the neural networks which are often considered as a black box. In this paper it is analyzed how recurrent neural network (RNNs) cope with temporal dependencies by determining the relevant memory time span in a long short-term memory (LSTM) cell. This is done by leaking the state variable with a controlled lifetime and evaluating the task performance. This technique can be used for any task to estimate the time span the LSTM exploit…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Microsoft Research, New England（微软新英格兰研究院）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
We develop a family of accelerated stochastic algorithms that minimize sums of convex functions. Our algorithms improve upon the fastest running time for empirical risk minimization (ERM), and in particular linear least-squares regression, across a wide range of problem settings. To achieve this, we establish a framework based on the classical proximal point algorithm. Namely, we provide several algorithms that reduce the minimization of a strongly convex function to approximate minimizations of regularizations of the function. Using these results, we accelerate recent fast stochastic algorith…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Amazon AI（亚马逊人工智能）；UC Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
To make deep neural networks feasible in resource-constrained environments (such as mobile devices), it is beneficial to quantize models by using low-precision weights. One common technique for quantizing neural networks is the straight-through gradient method, which enables back-propagation through the quantization mapping. Despite its empirical success, little is understood about why the straight-through gradient method works. Building upon a novel observation that the straight-through gradient method is in fact identical to the well-known Nesterov's dual-averaging algorithm on a quantizatio…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem, proximal gradient method could fail because the explicit gradients of these problems are difficult or infeasible to obtain. The gradient-free (zeroth-order) method can address these problems because only the objective function values are required in the optimization. Recently, the first zeroth-order proximal stochastic algorithm was proposed to solve the no…
Pune Institute of Computer Technology（浦那计算机技术学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）；L3Cube Pune（L3Cube浦那）
Text classification is the most basic natural language processing task. It has a wide range of applications ranging from sentiment analysis to topic classification. Recently, deep learning approaches based on CNN, LSTM, and Transformers have been the de facto approach for text classification. In this work, we highlight a common issue associated with these approaches. We show that these systems are over-reliant on the important words present in the text that are useful for classification. With limited training data and discriminative training strategy, these approaches tend to ignore the semant…
Proximal Control of UAVs with Federated Learning for Human-Robot Collaborative Domains
Lab of Systems Engineering and Robotics (LASER), Department of Computer Systems, Universidade Federal da Paraiba（系统工程与机器人实验室（LASER），计算机系统系，巴伊帕巴联邦大学）；Department of Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague（控制论系，布拉格捷克技术大学）
Variational methods are widely applied to ill-posed inverse problems for they have the ability to embed prior knowledge about the solution. However, the level of performance of these methods significantly depends on a set of parameters, which can be estimated through computationally expensive and time-consuming methods. In contrast, deep learning offers very generic and efficient architectures, at the expense of explainability, since it is often used as a black-box, without any fine control over its output. Deep unfolding provides a convenient approach to combine variational-based and deep lea…
University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）；Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa（爱荷华大学蒂皮商学院）
Driven by an increasing need for model interpretability, interpretable models have become strong competitors for black-box models in many real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel type of model where interpretable models compete and collaborate with black-box models. We present the Model-Agnostic Linear Competitors (MALC) for partially interpretable classification. MALC is a hybrid model that uses linear models to locally substitute any black-box model, capturing subspaces that are most likely to be in a class while leaving the rest of the data to the black-box. MALC brings together…
Although various techniques have been proposed to generate adversarial samples for white-box attacks on text, little attention has been paid to black-box attacks, which are more realistic scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm, DeepWordBug, to effectively generate small text perturbations in a black-box setting that forces a deep-learning classifier to misclassify a text input. We employ novel scoring strategies to identify the critical tokens that, if modified, cause the classifier to make an incorrect prediction. Simple character-level transformations are applied to the highe…
COVID-19 has been one of the most severe diseases, causing a harsh pandemic all over the world, since December 2019. The aim of this study is to evaluate the value of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Networks in forecasting the total number of COVID-19 cases in Turkey. The COVID-19 data for 30 days, between March 24 and April 23, 2020, are used to estimate the next fifteen days. The mean absolute error of the LSTM Network for 15 days estimation is 1,69$\pm$1.35%. Whereas, for the same data, the error of the Box-Jenkins method is 3.24$\pm$1.56%, Prophet method is 6.88$\pm$4.96% and Holt-Winters Ad…
Although machine learning (ML) is increasingly employed recently for mechanistic problems, the black-box nature of conventional ML architectures lacks the physical knowledge to infer unforeseen input conditions. This implies both severe overfitting during a dearth of training data and inadequate physical interpretability, which motivates us to propose a new kinematically consistent, physics-based ML model. In particular, we attempt to perform physically interpretable learning of inverse problems in wave propagation without suffering overfitting restrictions. Towards this goal, we employ long s…
University of California（加利福尼亚大学）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Neural programming involves training neural networks to learn programs, mathematics, or logic from data. Previous works have failed to achieve good generalization performance, especially on problems and programs with high complexity or on large domains. This is because they mostly rely either on black-box function evaluations that do not capture the structure of the program, or on detailed execution traces that are expensive to obtain, and hence the training data has poor coverage of the domain under consideration. We present a novel framework that utilizes black-box function evaluations, in c…
Department of Research and Intelligence Cylance, Inc.（Cylance公司研究与情报部）
We present PROPS, a lightweight transfer learning mechanism for sequential data. PROPS learns probabilistic perturbations around the predictions of one or more arbitrarily complex, pre-trained black box models (such as recurrent neural networks). The technique pins the black-box prediction functions to "source nodes" of a hidden Markov model (HMM), and uses the remaining nodes as "perturbation nodes" for learning customized perturbations around those predictions. In this paper, we describe the PROPS model, provide an algorithm for online learning of its parameters, and demonstrate the consiste…
EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Sharif University（谢里夫大学）；University of Cagliari（卡利亚里大学）
Neural networks are ubiquitous in applied machine learning for education. Their pervasive success in predictive performance comes alongside a severe weakness, the lack of explainability of their decisions, especially relevant in human-centric fields. We implement five state-of-the-art methodologies for explaining black-box machine learning models (LIME, PermutationSHAP, KernelSHAP, DiCE, CEM) and examine the strengths of each approach on the downstream task of student performance prediction for five massive open online courses. Our experiments demonstrate that the families of explainers do not…
Optimizing the Unknown: Black Box Bayesian Optimization with Energy-Based Model and Reinforcement Learning
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科学与技术大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科学与技术大学）
The widespread application of deep neural network (DNN) techniques is being challenged by adversarial examples, the legitimate input added with imperceptible and well-designed perturbations that can fool DNNs easily in the DNN testing/deploying stage. Previous adversarial example generation algorithms for adversarial white-box attacks used Jacobian gradient information to add perturbations. This information is too imprecise and inexplicit, which will cause unnecessary perturbations when generating adversarial examples. This paper aims to address this issue. We first propose to apply a more inf…
Developing Lagrangian-based Methods for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization
Institute of Operational Research and Analytics, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学运营研究与分析研究所）；School of Computer and Computing Science, Hangzhou City University（杭州城市大学计算机与计算科学学院）
DENSO CORPORATION（电装株式会社）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；National Inst. of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（国立先进工业科学技术研究所）
Deep learning techniques are rapidly advanced recently, and becoming a necessity component for widespread systems. However, the inference process of deep learning is black-box, and not very suitable to safety-critical systems which must exhibit high transparency. In this paper, to address this black-box limitation, we develop a simple analysis method which consists of 1) structural feature analysis: lists of the features contributing to inference process, 2) linguistic feature analysis: lists of the natural language labels describing the visual attributes for each feature contributing to infer…
Context-Aware Concept Distillation for Trustworthy Flood Prediction
School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem（耶路撒冷希伯来大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Institute of Earth Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem（耶路撒冷希伯来大学地球科学研究所）；Hebrew University Business School, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem（耶路撒冷希伯来大学商学院）
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Damo Academy, Alibaba US（阿里巴巴美国达摩院）；Xmotors AI（Xmotors人工智能公司）
We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include a regularization term, using (possibly noisy) evaluations of the function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or black-box optimization. We propose a new $\textbf{Z}$eroth-$\textbf{O}$rder $\textbf{R}$egularized $\textbf{O}$ptimization method, dubbed ZORO. When the underlying gradient is approximately sparse at an iterate, ZORO needs very few objective function evaluations to obtain a new iterate that decreases the objective function. We achieve this with an adaptive, ran…
