arXiv subjects

Kristian Kersting

Publications and source records attributed to Kristian Kersting.

At least 235 records · Page 13Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Fitted Q-Learning for Relational Domains

We consider the problem of Approximate Dynamic Programming in relational domains. Inspired by the success of fitted Q-learning methods in propositional settings, we develop the first relational fitted Q-learning algorithms by representing the value function and Bellman residuals. When we fit the Q-functions, we show how the two steps of Bellman operator; application and projection steps can be performed using a gradient-boosting technique. Our proposed framework performs reasonably well on standard domains without using domain models and using fewer training trajectories.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Structured Object-Aware Physics Prediction for Video Modeling and Planning

When humans observe a physical system, they can easily locate objects, understand their interactions, and anticipate future behavior, even in settings with complicated and previously unseen interactions. For computers, however, learning such models from videos in an unsupervised fashion is an unsolved research problem. In this paper, we present STOVE, a novel state-space model for videos, which explicitly reasons about objects and their positions, velocities, and interactions. It is constructed by combining an image model and a dynamics model in compositional manner and improves on previous work by reusing the dynamics model for inference, accelerating and regularizing training. STOVE predicts videos with convincing physical behavior over hundreds of timesteps, outperforms previous unsupervised models, and even approaches the performance of supervised baselines. We further demonstrate the strength of our model as a simulator for sample efficient model-based control in a task with heavily interacting objects.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Padé Activation Units: End-to-end Learning of Flexible Activation Functions in Deep Networks

The performance of deep network learning strongly depends on the choice of the non-linear activation function associated with each neuron. However, deciding on the best activation is non-trivial, and the choice depends on the architecture, hyper-parameters, and even on the dataset. Typically these activations are fixed by hand before training. Here, we demonstrate how to eliminate the reliance on first picking fixed activation functions by using flexible parametric rational functions instead. The resulting Padé Activation Units (PAUs) can both approximate common activation functions and also learn new ones while providing compact representations. Our empirical evidence shows that end-to-end learning deep networks with PAUs can increase the predictive performance. Moreover, PAUs pave the way to approximations with provable robustness. https://github.com/ml-research/pau

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

CryptoSPN: Privacy-preserving Sum-Product Network Inference

AI algorithms, and machine learning (ML) techniques in particular, are increasingly important to individuals' lives, but have caused a range of privacy concerns addressed by, e.g., the European GDPR. Using cryptographic techniques, it is possible to perform inference tasks remotely on sensitive client data in a privacy-preserving way: the server learns nothing about the input data and the model predictions, while the client learns nothing about the ML model (which is often considered intellectual property and might contain traces of sensitive data). While such privacy-preserving solutions are relatively efficient, they are mostly targeted at neural networks, can degrade the predictive accuracy, and usually reveal the network's topology. Furthermore, existing solutions are not readily accessible to ML experts, as prototype implementations are not well-integrated into ML frameworks and require extensive cryptographic knowledge. In this paper, we present CryptoSPN, a framework for privacy-preserving inference of sum-product networks (SPNs). SPNs are a tractable probabilistic graphical model that allows a range of exact inference queries in linear time. Specifically, we show how to efficiently perform SPN inference via secure multi-party computation (SMPC) without accuracy degradation while hiding sensitive client and training information with provable security guarantees. Next to foundations, CryptoSPN encompasses tools to easily transform existing SPNs into privacy-preserving executables. Our empirical results demonstrate that CryptoSPN achieves highly efficient and accurate inference in the order of seconds for medium-sized SPNs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2020

Neural-Symbolic Argumentation Mining: an Argument in Favor of Deep Learning and Reasoning

Deep learning is bringing remarkable contributions to the field of argumentation mining, but the existing approaches still need to fill the gap toward performing advanced reasoning tasks. In this position paper, we posit that neural-symbolic and statistical relational learning could play a crucial role in the integration of symbolic and sub-symbolic methods to achieve this goal.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2020

Neural Networks for Relational Data

While deep networks have been enormously successful over the last decade, they rely on flat-feature vector representations, which makes them unsuitable for richly structured domains such as those arising in applications like social network analysis. Such domains rely on relational representations to capture complex relationships between entities and their attributes. Thus, we consider the problem of learning neural networks for relational data. We distinguish ourselves from current approaches that rely on expert hand-coded rules by learning relational random-walk-based features to capture local structural interactions and the resulting network architecture. We further exploit parameter tying of the network weights of the resulting relational neural network, where instances of the same type share parameters. Our experimental results across several standard relational data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach over multiple neural net baselines as well as state-of-the-art statistical relational models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

BERT has a Moral Compass: Improvements of ethical and moral values of machines

Allowing machines to choose whether to kill humans would be devastating for world peace and security. But how do we equip machines with the ability to learn ethical or even moral choices? Jentzsch et al.(2019) showed that applying machine learning to human texts can extract deontological ethical reasoning about "right" and "wrong" conduct by calculating a moral bias score on a sentence level using sentence embeddings. The machine learned that it is objectionable to kill living beings, but it is fine to kill time; It is essential to eat, yet one might not eat dirt; it is important to spread information, yet one should not spread misinformation. However, the evaluated moral bias was restricted to simple actions -- one verb -- and a ranking of actions with surrounding context. Recently BERT ---and variants such as RoBERTa and SBERT--- has set a new state-of-the-art performance for a wide range of NLP tasks. But has BERT also a better moral compass? In this paper, we discuss and show that this is indeed the case. Thus, recent improvements of language representations also improve the representation of the underlying ethical and moral values of the machine. We argue that through an advanced semantic representation of text, BERT allows one to get better insights of moral and ethical values implicitly represented in text. This enables the Moral Choice Machine (MCM) to extract more accurate imprints of moral choices and ethical values.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Conditional Sum-Product Networks: Imposing Structure on Deep Probabilistic Architectures

Probabilistic graphical models are a central tool in AI; however, they are generally not as expressive as deep neural models, and inference is notoriously hard and slow. In contrast, deep probabilistic models such as sum-product networks (SPNs) capture joint distributions in a tractable fashion, but still lack the expressive power of intractable models based on deep neural networks. Therefore, we introduce conditional SPNs (CSPNs), conditional density estimators for multivariate and potentially hybrid domains which allow harnessing the expressive power of neural networks while still maintaining tractability guarantees. One way to implement CSPNs is to use an existing SPN structure and condition its parameters on the input, e.g., via a deep neural network. This approach, however, might misrepresent the conditional independence structure present in data. Consequently, we also develop a structure-learning approach that derives both the structure and parameters of CSPNs from data. Our experimental evidence demonstrates that CSPNs are competitive with other probabilistic models and yield superior performance on multilabel image classification compared to mean field and mixture density networks. Furthermore, they can successfully be employed as building blocks for structured probabilistic models, such as autoregressive image models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

A Unifying View of Explicit and Implicit Feature Maps of Graph Kernels

Non-linear kernel methods can be approximated by fast linear ones using suitable explicit feature maps allowing their application to large scale problems. We investigate how convolution kernels for structured data are composed from base kernels and construct corresponding feature maps. On this basis we propose exact and approximative feature maps for widely used graph kernels based on the kernel trick. We analyze for which kernels and graph properties computation by explicit feature maps is feasible and actually more efficient. In particular, we derive approximative, explicit feature maps for state-of-the-art kernels supporting real-valued attributes including the GraphHopper and graph invariant kernels. In extensive experiments we show that our approaches often achieve a classification accuracy close to the exact methods based on the kernel trick, but require only a fraction of their running time. Moreover, we propose and analyze algorithms for computing random walk, shortest-path and subgraph matching kernels by explicit and implicit feature maps. Our theoretical results are confirmed experimentally by observing a phase transition when comparing running time with respect to label diversity, walk lengths and subgraph size, respectively.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

DeepDB: Learn from Data, not from Queries!

The typical approach for learned DBMS components is to capture the behavior by running a representative set of queries and use the observations to train a machine learning model. This workload-driven approach, however, has two major downsides. First, collecting the training data can be very expensive, since all queries need to be executed on potentially large databases. Second, training data has to be recollected when the workload and the data changes. To overcome these limitations, we take a different route: we propose to learn a pure data-driven model that can be used for different tasks such as query answering or cardinality estimation. This data-driven model also supports ad-hoc queries and updates of the data without the need of full retraining when the workload or data changes. Indeed, one may now expect that this comes at a price of lower accuracy since workload-driven models can make use of more information. However, this is not the case. The results of our empirical evaluation demonstrate that our data-driven approach not only provides better accuracy than state-of-the-art learned components but also generalizes better to unseen queries.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2019

Learning to play the Chess Variant Crazyhouse above World Champion Level with Deep Neural Networks and Human Data

Deep neural networks have been successfully applied in learning the board games Go, chess and shogi without prior knowledge by making use of reinforcement learning. Although starting from zero knowledge has been shown to yield impressive results, it is associated with high computationally costs especially for complex games. With this paper, we present CrazyAra which is a neural network based engine solely trained in supervised manner for the chess variant crazyhouse. Crazyhouse is a game with a higher branching factor than chess and there is only limited data of lower quality available compared to AlphaGo. Therefore, we focus on improving efficiency in multiple aspects while relying on low computational resources. These improvements include modifications in the neural network design and training configuration, the introduction of a data normalization step and a more sample efficient Monte-Carlo tree search which has a lower chance to blunder. After training on 569,537 human games for 1.5 days we achieve a move prediction accuracy of 60.4%. During development, versions of CrazyAra played professional human players. Most notably, CrazyAra achieved a four to one win over 2017 crazyhouse world champion Justin Tan (aka LM Jann Lee) who is more than 400 Elo higher rated compared to the average player in our training set. Furthermore, we test the playing strength of CrazyAra on CPU against all participants of the second Crazyhouse Computer Championships 2017, winning against twelve of the thirteen participants. Finally, for CrazyAraFish we continue training our model on generated engine games. In ten long-time control matches playing Stockfish 10, CrazyAraFish wins three games and draws one out of ten matches.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Random Sum-Product Forests with Residual Links

Tractable yet expressive density estimators are a key building block of probabilistic machine learning. While sum-product networks (SPNs) offer attractive inference capabilities, obtaining structures large enough to fit complex, high-dimensional data has proven challenging. In this paper, we present random sum-product forests (RSPFs), an ensemble approach for mixing multiple randomly generated SPNs. We also introduce residual links, which reference specialized substructures of other component SPNs in order to leverage the context-specific knowledge encoded within them. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that RSPFs provide better performance than their individual components. Adding residual links improves the models further, allowing the resulting ResSPNs to be competitive with commonly used structure learning methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Declarative Learning-Based Programming as an Interface to AI Systems

Data-driven approaches are becoming more common as problem-solving techniques in many areas of research and industry. In most cases, machine learning models are the key component of these solutions, but a solution involves multiple such models, along with significant levels of reasoning with the models' output and input. Current technologies do not make such techniques easy to use for application experts who are not fluent in machine learning nor for machine learning experts who aim at testing ideas and models on real-world data in the context of the overall AI system. We review key efforts made by various AI communities to provide languages for high-level abstractions over learning and reasoning techniques needed for designing complex AI systems. We classify the existing frameworks based on the type of techniques and the data and knowledge representations they use, provide a comparative study of the way they address the challenges of programming real-world applications, and highlight some shortcomings and future directions.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Was ist eine Professur fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz?

The Federal Government of Germany aims to boost the research in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). For instance, 100 new professorships are said to be established. However, the white paper of the government does not answer what an AI professorship is at all. In order to give colleagues, politicians, and citizens an idea, we present a view that is often followed when appointing professors for AI at German and international universities. We hope that it will help to establish a guideline with internationally accepted measures and thus make the public debate more informed.

cs.OH↗

arXiv2019

Automatic Bayesian Density Analysis

Making sense of a dataset in an automatic and unsupervised fashion is a challenging problem in statistics and AI. Classical approaches for {exploratory data analysis} are usually not flexible enough to deal with the uncertainty inherent to real-world data: they are often restricted to fixed latent interaction models and homogeneous likelihoods; they are sensitive to missing, corrupt and anomalous data; moreover, their expressiveness generally comes at the price of intractable inference. As a result, supervision from statisticians is usually needed to find the right model for the data. However, since domain experts are not necessarily also experts in statistics, we propose Automatic Bayesian Density Analysis (ABDA) to make exploratory data analysis accessible at large. Specifically, ABDA allows for automatic and efficient missing value estimation, statistical data type and likelihood discovery, anomaly detection and dependency structure mining, on top of providing accurate density estimation. Extensive empirical evidence shows that ABDA is a suitable tool for automatic exploratory analysis of mixed continuous and discrete tabular data.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

SPFlow: An Easy and Extensible Library for Deep Probabilistic Learning using Sum-Product Networks

We introduce SPFlow, an open-source Python library providing a simple interface to inference, learning and manipulation routines for deep and tractable probabilistic models called Sum-Product Networks (SPNs). The library allows one to quickly create SPNs both from data and through a domain specific language (DSL). It efficiently implements several probabilistic inference routines like computing marginals, conditionals and (approximate) most probable explanations (MPEs) along with sampling as well as utilities for serializing, plotting and structure statistics on an SPN. Moreover, many of the algorithms proposed in the literature to learn the structure and parameters of SPNs are readily available in SPFlow. Furthermore, SPFlow is extremely extensible and customizable, allowing users to promptly distill new inference and learning routines by injecting custom code into a lightweight functional-oriented API framework. This is achieved in SPFlow by keeping an internal Python representation of the graph structure that also enables practical compilation of an SPN into a TensorFlow graph, C, CUDA or FPGA custom code, significantly speeding-up computations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Model-based Approximate Query Processing

Interactive visualizations are arguably the most important tool to explore, understand and convey facts about data. In the past years, the database community has been working on different techniques for Approximate Query Processing (AQP) that aim to deliver an approximate query result given a fixed time bound to support interactive visualizations better. However, classical AQP approaches suffer from various problems that limit the applicability to support the ad-hoc exploration of a new data set: (1) Classical AQP approaches that perform online sampling can support ad-hoc exploration queries but yield low quality if executed over rare subpopulations. (2) Classical AQP approaches that rely on offline sampling can use some form of biased sampling to mitigate these problems but require a priori knowledge of the workload, which is often not realistic if users want to explore a new database. In this paper, we present a new approach to AQP called Model-based AQP that leverages generative models learned over the complete database to answer SQL queries at interactive speeds. Different from classical AQP approaches, generative models allow us to compute responses to ad-hoc queries and deliver high-quality estimates also over rare subpopulations at the same time. In our experiments with real and synthetic data sets, we show that Model-based AQP can in many scenarios return more accurate results in a shorter runtime. Furthermore, we think that our techniques of using generative models presented in this paper can not only be used for AQP in databases but also has applications for other database problems including Query Optimization as well as Data Cleaning.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2018

Structure Learning for Relational Logistic Regression: An Ensemble Approach

We consider the problem of learning Relational Logistic Regression (RLR). Unlike standard logistic regression, the features of RLRs are first-order formulae with associated weight vectors instead of scalar weights. We turn the problem of learning RLR to learning these vector-weighted formulae and develop a learning algorithm based on the recently successful functional-gradient boosting methods for probabilistic logic models. We derive the functional gradients and show how weights can be learned simultaneously in an efficient manner. Our empirical evaluation on standard and novel data sets demonstrates the superiority of our approach over other methods for learning RLR.

cs.LG↗