No Arabic abstract
Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) supports practitioners and researchers with the tedious task of designing machine learning pipelines and has recently achieved substantial success. In this paper we introduce new AutoML approaches motivated by our winning submission to the second ChaLearn AutoML challenge. We develop PoSH Auto-sklearn, which enables AutoML systems to work well on large datasets under rigid time limits using a new, simple and meta-feature-free meta-learning technique and employs a successful bandit strategy for budget allocation. However, PoSH Auto-sklearn introduces even more ways of running AutoML and might make it harder for users to set it up correctly. Therefore, we also go one step further and study the design space of AutoML itself, proposing a solution towards truly hands-free AutoML. Together, these changes give rise to the next generation of our AutoML system, Auto-sklearn 2.0 . We verify the improvements by these additions in a large experimental study on 39 AutoML benchmark datasets and conclude the paper by comparing to other popular AutoML frameworks and Auto-sklearn 1.0 , reducing the relative error by up to a factor of 4.5, and yielding a performance in 10 minutes that is substantially better than what Auto-sklearn 1.0 achieves within an hour.
Exploration-exploitation dilemma has long been a crucial issue in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatically balance between these two. Our method is built upon the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm, which uses an entropy temperature that balances the original task reward and the policy entropy, and hence controls the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. It is empirically shown that SAC is very sensitive to this hyperparameter, and the follow-up work (SAC-v2), which uses constrained optimization for automatic adjustment, has some limitations. The core of our method, namely Meta-SAC, is to use metagradient along with a novel meta objective to automatically tune the entropy temperature in SAC. We show that Meta-SAC achieves promising performances on several of the Mujoco benchmarking tasks, and outperforms SAC-v2 over 10% in one of the most challenging tasks, humanoid-v2.
A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this challenge by instead inferring a reward function from expert behavior. While appealing, it can be impractically expensive to collect datasets of demonstrations that cover the variation common in the real world (e.g. opening any type of door). Thus in practice, IRL must commonly be performed with only a limited set of demonstrations where it can be exceedingly difficult to unambiguously recover a reward function. In this work, we exploit the insight that demonstrations from other tasks can be used to constrain the set of possible reward functions by learning a prior that is specifically optimized for the ability to infer expressive reward functions from limited numbers of demonstrations. We demonstrate that our method can efficiently recover rewards from images for novel tasks and provide intuition as to how our approach is analogous to learning a prior.
Meta-learning has proven to be a powerful paradigm for transferring the knowledge from previous tasks to facilitate the learning of a novel task. Current dominant algorithms train a well-generalized model initialization which is adapted to each task via the support set. The crux lies in optimizing the generalization capability of the initialization, which is measured by the performance of the adapted model on the query set of each task. Unfortunately, this generalization measure, evidenced by empirical results, pushes the initialization to overfit the meta-training tasks, which significantly impairs the generalization and adaptation to novel tasks. To address this issue, we actively augment a meta-training task with more data when evaluating the generalization. Concretely, we propose two task augmentation methods, including MetaMix and Channel Shuffle. MetaMix linearly combines features and labels of samples from both the support and query sets. For each class of samples, Channel Shuffle randomly replaces a subset of their channels with the corresponding ones from a different class. Theoretical studies show how task augmentation improves the generalization of meta-learning. Moreover, both MetaMix and Channel Shuffle outperform state-of-the-art results by a large margin across many datasets and are compatible with existing meta-learning algorithms.
Meta-learning optimizes the hyperparameters of a training procedure, such as its initialization, kernel, or learning rate, based on data sampled from a number of auxiliary tasks. A key underlying assumption is that the auxiliary tasks, known as meta-training tasks, share the same generating distribution as the tasks to be encountered at deployment time, known as meta-test tasks. This may, however, not be the case when the test environment differ from the meta-training conditions. To address shifts in task generating distribution between meta-training and meta-testing phases, this paper introduces weighted free energy minimization (WFEM) for transfer meta-learning. We instantiate the proposed approach for non-parametric Bayesian regression and classification via Gaussian Processes (GPs). The method is validated on a toy sinusoidal regression problem, as well as on classification using miniImagenet and CUB data sets, through comparison with standard meta-learning of GP priors as implemented by PACOH.
Meta-learning algorithms aim to learn two components: a model that predicts targets for a task, and a base learner that quickly updates that model when given examples from a new task. This additional level of learning can be powerful, but it also creates another potential source for overfitting, since we can now overfit in either the model or the base learner. We describe both of these forms of metalearning overfitting, and demonstrate that they appear experimentally in common meta-learning benchmarks. We then use an information-theoretic framework to discuss meta-augmentation, a way to add randomness that discourages the base learner and model from learning trivial solutions that do not generalize to new tasks. We demonstrate that meta-augmentation produces large complementary benefits to recently proposed meta-regularization techniques.