Artificial Intelligence

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Mediation Challenges and Socio-Technical Gaps for Explainable Deep Learning Applications (1907.07178v1)

Rafael Brandão, Joel Carbonera, Clarisse de Souza, Juliana Ferreira, Bernardo Gonçalves, Carla Leitão

2019-07-16

The presumed data owners' right to explanations brought about by the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe has shed light on the social challenges of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In this paper, we present a case study with Deep Learning (DL) experts from a research and development laboratory focused on the delivery of industrial-strength AI technologies. Our aim was to investigate the social meaning (i.e. meaning to others) that DL experts assign to what they do, given a richly contextualized and familiar domain of application. Using qualitative research techniques to collect and analyze empirical data, our study has shown that participating DL experts did not spontaneously engage into considerations about the social meaning of machine learning models that they build. Moreover, when explicitly stimulated to do so, these experts expressed expectations that, with real-world DL application, there will be available mediators to bridge the gap between technical meanings that drive DL work, and social meanings that AI technology users assign to it. We concluded that current research incentives and values guiding the participants' scientific interests and conduct are at odds with those required to face some of the scientific challenges involved in advancing XAI, and thus responding to the alleged data owners' right to explanations or similar societal demands emerging from current debates. As a concrete contribution to mitigate what seems to be a more general problem, we propose three preliminary XAI Mediation Challenges with the potential to bring together technical and social meanings of DL applications, as well as to foster much needed interdisciplinary collaboration among AI and the Social Sciences researchers.

The Secret Sharer: Evaluating and Testing Unintended Memorization in Neural Networks (1802.08232v3)

Nicholas Carlini, Chang Liu, Úlfar Erlingsson, Jernej Kos, Dawn Song

2018-02-22

This paper describes a testing methodology for quantitatively assessing the risk that rare or unique training-data sequences are unintentionally memorized by generative sequence models---a common type of machine-learning model. Because such models are sometimes trained on sensitive data (e.g., the text of users' private messages), this methodology can benefit privacy by allowing deep-learning practitioners to select means of training that minimize such memorization. In experiments, we show that unintended memorization is a persistent, hard-to-avoid issue that can have serious consequences. Specifically, for models trained without consideration of memorization, we describe new, efficient procedures that can extract unique, secret sequences, such as credit card numbers. We show that our testing strategy is a practical and easy-to-use first line of defense, e.g., by describing its application to quantitatively limit data exposure in Google's Smart Compose, a commercial text-completion neural network trained on millions of users' email messages.

Forecasting Transformative AI: An Expert Survey (1901.08579v2)

Ross Gruetzemacher, David Paradice, Kang Bok Lee

2019-01-24

Transformative AI technologies have the potential to reshape critical aspects of society in the near future. However, in order to properly prepare policy initiatives for the arrival of such technologies accurate forecasts and timelines are necessary. A survey was administered to attendees of three AI conferences during the summer of 2018 (ICML, IJCAI and the HLAI conference). The survey included questions for estimating AI capabilities over the next decade, questions for forecasting five scenarios of transformative AI and questions concerning the impact of computational resources in AI research. Respondents indicated a median of 21.5% of human tasks (i.e., all tasks that humans are currently paid to do) can be feasibly automated now, and that this figure would rise to 40% in 5 years and 60% in 10 years. Median forecasts indicated a 50% probability of AI systems being capable of automating 90% of current human tasks in 25 years and 99% of current human tasks in 50 years. The conference of attendance was found to have a statistically significant impact on all forecasts, with attendees of HLAI providing more optimistic timelines with less uncertainty. These findings suggest that AI experts expect major advances in AI technology to continue over the next decade to a degree that will likely have profound transformative impacts on society.

Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning (1903.08671v4)

Rahaf Aljundi, Min Lin, Baptiste Goujaud, Yoshua Bengio

2019-03-20

A continual learning agent learns online with a non-stationary and never-ending stream of data. The key to such learning process is to overcome the catastrophic forgetting of previously seen data, which is a well known problem of neural networks. To prevent forgetting, a replay buffer is usually employed to store the previous data for the purpose of rehearsal. Previous works often depend on task boundary and i.i.d. assumptions to properly select samples for the replay buffer. In this work, we formulate sample selection as a constraint reduction problem based on the constrained optimization view of continual learning. The goal is to select a fixed subset of constraints that best approximate the feasible region defined by the original constraints. We show that it is equivalent to maximizing the diversity of samples in the replay buffer with parameters gradient as the feature. We further develop a greedy alternative that is cheap and efficient. The advantage of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing to other alternatives under the continual learning setting. Further comparisons are made against state of the art methods that rely on task boundaries which show comparable or even better results for our method.

A Simple BERT-Based Approach for Lexical Simplification (1907.06226v2)

Jipeng Qiang, Yun Li, Yi Zhu, Yunhao Yuan

2019-07-14

Lexical simplification (LS) aims to replace complex words in a given sentence with their simpler alternatives of equivalent meaning. Recently unsupervised lexical simplification approaches only rely on the complex word itself regardless of the given sentence to generate candidate substitutions, which will inevitably produce a large number of spurious candidates. We present a simple BERT-based LS approach that makes use of the pre-trained unsupervised deep bidirectional representations BERT. We feed the given sentence masked the complex word into the masking language model of BERT to generate candidate substitutions. By considering the whole sentence, the generated simpler alternatives are easier to hold cohesion and coherence of a sentence. Experimental results show that our approach obtains obvious improvement on standard LS benchmark.

Adaptive Prior Selection for Repertoire-based Online Learning in Robotics (1907.07029v1)

Rituraj Kaushik, Pierre Desreumaux, Jean-Baptiste Mouret

2019-07-16

Among the data-efficient approaches for online adaptation in robotics (meta-learning, model-based reinforcement learning, etc.), repertoire-based learning (1) generates a large and diverse set policies in simulation that acts as a "reservoir" for future adaptations and (2) learns to pick online the best working policies according to the current situation (e.g., a damaged robot, a new object, etc.). Each of these policies performs a different task, for instance, walking in different directions; these policies are then sequenced with a planning algorithm to achieve the given task. In this paper, we relax the assumption of previous works that a single repertoire is enough for adaptation. Instead, we generate repertoires for many different situations (e.g., with a missing leg, on different floors, etc.) in simulation that act as priors for adaptation. Our main contribution is an algorithm, APROL (Adaptive Prior selection for Repertoire-based Online Learning) to plan the next action by incorporating these priors when the robot has no information about the current situation. We evaluate APROL on two simulated tasks: (1) pushing unknown objects of various shapes and sizes with a kuka arm and (2) a goal reaching task with a damaged hexapod robot. We compare with "Reset-free Trial and Error" (RTE) and various single repertoire-based baselines. The results show that APROL solves both tasks in less interaction time than the baselines. Additionally, we demonstrate APROL on a real, damaged hexapod that quickly learns compensatory policies to reach a goal by avoiding obstacle in the path.

Unforeseen Evidence (1907.07019v1)

Evan Piermont

2019-07-16

I proposes a normative updating rule, extended Bayesianism, for the incorporation of probabilistic information arising from the process of becoming more aware. Extended Bayesianism generalizes standard Bayesian updating to allow the posterior to reside on richer probability space than the prior. I then provided an observable criterion on prior and posterior beliefs such that they were consistent with extended Bayesianism.

Improved Reinforcement Learning through Imitation Learning Pretraining Towards Image-based Autonomous Driving (1907.06838v1)

Tianqi Wang, Dong Eui Chang

2019-07-16

We present a training pipeline for the autonomous driving task given the current camera image and vehicle speed as the input to produce the throttle, brake, and steering control output. The simulator Airsim's convenient weather and lighting API provides a sufficient diversity during training which can be very helpful to increase the trained policy's robustness. In order to not limit the possible policy's performance, we use a continuous and deterministic control policy setting. We utilize ResNet-34 as our actor and critic networks with some slight changes in the fully connected layers. Considering human's mastery of this task and the high-complexity nature of this task, we first use imitation learning to mimic the given human policy and leverage the trained policy and its weights to the reinforcement learning phase for which we use DDPG. This combination shows a considerable performance boost comparing to both pure imitation learning and pure DDPG for the autonomous driving task.

Evaluating Explanation Without Ground Truth in Interpretable Machine Learning (1907.06831v1)

Fan Yang, Mengnan Du, Xia Hu

2019-07-16

Interpretable Machine Learning (IML) has become increasingly important in many applications, such as autonomous cars and medical diagnosis, where explanations are preferred to help people better understand how machine learning systems work and further enhance their trust towards systems. Particularly in robotics, explanations from IML are significantly helpful in providing reasons for those adverse and inscrutable actions, which could impair the safety and profit of the public. However, due to the diversified scenarios and subjective nature of explanations, we rarely have the ground truth for benchmark evaluation in IML on the quality of generated explanations. Having a sense of explanation quality not only matters for quantifying system boundaries, but also helps to realize the true benefits to human users in real-world applications. To benchmark evaluation in IML, in this paper, we rigorously define the problem of evaluating explanations, and systematically review the existing efforts. Specifically, we summarize three general aspects of explanation (i.e., predictability, fidelity and persuasibility) with formal definitions, and respectively review the representative methodologies for each of them under different tasks. Further, a unified evaluation framework is designed according to the hierarchical needs from developers and end-users, which could be easily adopted for different scenarios in practice. In the end, open problems are discussed, and several limitations of current evaluation techniques are raised for future explorations.

Relative Importance Sampling For Off-Policy Actor-Critic in Deep Reinforcement Learning (1810.12558v5)

Mahammad Humayoo, Xueqi Cheng

2018-10-30

Off-policy learning is more unstable compared to on-policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL). One reason for the instability of off-policy learning is a discrepancy between the target () and behavior (b) policy distributions. The discrepancy between and b distributions can be alleviated by employing a smooth variant of the importance sampling (IS), such as the relative importance sampling (RIS). RIS has parameter which controls smoothness. To cope with instability, we present the first relative importance sampling-off-policy actor-critic (RIS-Off-PAC) model-free algorithms in RL. In our method, the network yields a target policy (the actor), a value function (the critic) assessing the current policy () using samples drawn from behavior policy. We use action value generated from the behavior policy in reward function to train our algorithm rather than from the target policy. We also use deep neural networks to train both actor and critic. We evaluated our algorithm on a number of Open AI Gym benchmark problems and demonstrate better or comparable performance to several state-of-the-art RL baselines.

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