No Arabic abstract
In many classification problems unlabelled data is abundant and a subset can be chosen for labelling. This defines the context of active learning (AL), where methods systematically select that subset, to improve a classifier by retraining. Given a classification problem, and a classifier trained on a small number of labelled examples, consider the selection of a single further example. This example will be labelled by the oracle and then used to retrain the classifier. This example selection raises a central question: given a fully specified stochastic description of the classification problem, which example is the optimal selection? If optimality is defined in terms of loss, this definition directly produces expected loss reduction (ELR), a central quantity whose maximum yields the optimal example selection. This work presents a new theoretical approach to AL, example quality, which defines optimal AL behaviour in terms of ELR. Once optimal AL behaviour is defined mathematically, reasoning about this abstraction provides insights into AL. In a theoretical context the optimal selection is compared to existing AL methods, showing that heuristics can make sub-optimal selections. Algorithms are constructed to estimate example quality directly. A large-scale experimental study shows these algorithms to be competitive with standard AL methods.
A central question for active learning (AL) is: what is the optimal selection? Defining optimality by classifier loss produces a new characterisation of optimal AL behaviour, by treating expected loss reduction as a statistical target for estimation. This target forms the basis of model retraining improvement (MRI), a novel approach providing a statistical estimation framework for AL. This framework is constructed to address the central question of AL optimality, and to motivate the design of estimation algorithms. MRI allows the exploration of optimal AL behaviour, and the examination of AL heuristics, showing precisely how they make sub-optimal selections. The abstract formulation of MRI is used to provide a new guarantee for AL, that an unbiased MRI estimator should outperform random selection. This MRI framework reveals intricate estimation issues that in turn motivate the construction of new statistical AL algorithms. One new algorithm in particular performs strongly in a large-scale experimental study, compared to standard AL methods. This competitive performance suggests that practical efforts to minimise estimation bias may be important for AL applications.
The objective of active learning (AL) is to train classification models with less number of labeled instances by selecting only the most informative instances for labeling. The AL algorithms designed for other data types such as images and text do not perform well on graph-structured data. Although a few heuristics-based AL algorithms have been proposed for graphs, a principled approach is lacking. In this paper, we propose MetAL, an AL approach that selects unlabeled instances that directly improve the future performance of a classification model. For a semi-supervised learning problem, we formulate the AL task as a bilevel optimization problem. Based on recent work in meta-learning, we use the meta-gradients to approximate the impact of retraining the model with any unlabeled instance on the model performance. Using multiple graph datasets belonging to different domains, we demonstrate that MetAL efficiently outperforms existing state-of-the-art AL algorithms.
We introduce a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm called Deep Quality-Value (DQV) Learning. DQV uses temporal-difference learning to train a Value neural network and uses this network for training a second Quality-value network that learns to estimate state-action values. We first test DQVs update rules with Multilayer Perceptrons as function approximators on two classic RL problems, and then extend DQV with the use of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, `Experience Replay and `Target Neural Networks for tackling four games of the Atari Arcade Learning environment. Our results show that DQV learns significantly faster and better than Deep Q-Learning and Double Deep Q-Learning, suggesting that our algorithm can potentially be a better performing synchronous temporal difference algorithm than what is currently present in DRL.
This paper presents new machine learning approaches to approximate the solution of optimal stopping problems. The key idea of these methods is to use neural networks, where the hidden layers are generated randomly and only the last layer is trained, in order to approximate the continuation value. Our approaches are applicable for high dimensional problems where the existing approaches become increasingly impractical. In addition, since our approaches can be optimized using a simple linear regression, they are very easy to implement and theoretical guarantees can be provided. In Markovian examples our randomized reinforcement learning approach and in non-Markovian examples our randomized recurrent neural network approach outperform the state-of-the-art and other relevant machine learning approaches.
The transition state (TS) calculation is a grand challenge for computational intensive energy function. The traditional methods need to evaluate the gradients of the energy function at a very large number of locations. To reduce the number of expensive computations of the true gradients, we propose an active learning framework consisting of a statistical surrogate model, Gaussian process regression (GPR) for the energy function, and a single-walker dynamics method, gentle accent dynamics (GAD), for the saddle-type transition states. TS is detected by the GAD applied to the GPR surrogate for the gradient vector and the Hessian matrix. Our key ingredient for efficiency improvements is an active learning method which sequentially designs the most informative locations and takes evaluations of the original model at these locations to train GPR. We formulate this active learning task as the optimal experimental design problem and propose a very efficient sample-based sub-optimal criterion to construct the optimal locations. We show that the new method significantly decreases the required number of energy or force evaluations of the original model.