arXiv subjects

Murray Campbell

Publications and source records attributed to Murray Campbell.

30 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Learning to Recover Reasoning Chains for Multi-Hop Question Answering via Cooperative Games

We propose the new problem of learning to recover reasoning chains from weakly supervised signals, i.e., the question-answer pairs. We propose a cooperative game approach to deal with this problem, in which how the evidence passages are selected and how the selected passages are connected are handled by two models that cooperate to select the most confident chains from a large set of candidates (from distant supervision). For evaluation, we created benchmarks based on two multi-hop QA datasets, HotpotQA and MedHop; and hand-labeled reasoning chains for the latter. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Simple yet Effective Bridge Reasoning for Open-Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering

A key challenge of multi-hop question answering (QA) in the open-domain setting is to accurately retrieve the supporting passages from a large corpus. Existing work on open-domain QA typically relies on off-the-shelf information retrieval (IR) techniques to retrieve \textbf{answer passages}, i.e., the passages containing the groundtruth answers. However, IR-based approaches are insufficient for multi-hop questions, as the topic of the second or further hops is not explicitly covered by the question. To resolve this issue, we introduce a new sub-problem of open-domain multi-hop QA, which aims to recognize the bridge (\emph{i.e.}, the anchor that links to the answer passage) from the context of a set of start passages with a reading comprehension model. This model, the \textbf{bridge reasoner}, is trained with a weakly supervised signal and produces the candidate answer passages for the \textbf{passage reader} to extract the answer. On the full-wiki HotpotQA benchmark, we significantly improve the baseline method by 14 point F1. Without using any memory-inefficient contextual embeddings, our result is also competitive with the state-of-the-art that applies BERT in multiple modules.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

TED: Teaching AI to Explain its Decisions

Artificial intelligence systems are being increasingly deployed due to their potential to increase the efficiency, scale, consistency, fairness, and accuracy of decisions. However, as many of these systems are opaque in their operation, there is a growing demand for such systems to provide explanations for their decisions. Conventional approaches to this problem attempt to expose or discover the inner workings of a machine learning model with the hope that the resulting explanations will be meaningful to the consumer. In contrast, this paper suggests a new approach to this problem. It introduces a simple, practical framework, called Teaching Explanations for Decisions (TED), that provides meaningful explanations that match the mental model of the consumer. We illustrate the generality and effectiveness of this approach with two different examples, resulting in highly accurate explanations with no loss of prediction accuracy for these two examples.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Teaching AI to Explain its Decisions Using Embeddings and Multi-Task Learning

Using machine learning in high-stakes applications often requires predictions to be accompanied by explanations comprehensible to the domain user, who has ultimate responsibility for decisions and outcomes. Recently, a new framework for providing explanations, called TED, has been proposed to provide meaningful explanations for predictions. This framework augments training data to include explanations elicited from domain users, in addition to features and labels. This approach ensures that explanations for predictions are tailored to the complexity expectations and domain knowledge of the consumer. In this paper, we build on this foundational work, by exploring more sophisticated instantiations of the TED framework and empirically evaluate their effectiveness in two diverse domains, chemical odor and skin cancer prediction. Results demonstrate that meaningful explanations can be reliably taught to machine learning algorithms, and in some cases, improving modeling accuracy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Hybrid Reinforcement Learning with Expert State Sequences

Existing imitation learning approaches often require that the complete demonstration data, including sequences of actions and states, are available. In this paper, we consider a more realistic and difficult scenario where a reinforcement learning agent only has access to the state sequences of an expert, while the expert actions are unobserved. We propose a novel tensor-based model to infer the unobserved actions of the expert state sequences. The policy of the agent is then optimized via a hybrid objective combining reinforcement learning and imitation learning. We evaluated our hybrid approach on an illustrative domain and Atari games. The empirical results show that (1) the agents are able to leverage state expert sequences to learn faster than pure reinforcement learning baselines, (2) our tensor-based action inference model is advantageous compared to standard deep neural networks in inferring expert actions, and (3) the hybrid policy optimization objective is robust against noise in expert state sequences.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Interpretable Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning through Policy Orchestration

Autonomous cyber-physical agents and systems play an increasingly large role in our lives. To ensure that agents behave in ways aligned with the values of the societies in which they operate, we must develop techniques that allow these agents to not only maximize their reward in an environment, but also to learn and follow the implicit constraints of society. These constraints and norms can come from any number of sources including regulations, business process guidelines, laws, ethical principles, social norms, and moral values. We detail a novel approach that uses inverse reinforcement learning to learn a set of unspecified constraints from demonstrations of the task, and reinforcement learning to learn to maximize the environment rewards. More precisely, we assume that an agent can observe traces of behavior of members of the society but has no access to the explicit set of constraints that give rise to the observed behavior. Inverse reinforcement learning is used to learn such constraints, that are then combined with a possibly orthogonal value function through the use of a contextual bandit-based orchestrator that picks a contextually-appropriate choice between the two policies (constraint-based and environment reward-based) when taking actions. The contextual bandit orchestrator allows the agent to mix policies in novel ways, taking the best actions from either a reward maximizing or constrained policy. In addition, the orchestrator is transparent on which policy is being employed at each time step. We test our algorithms using a Pac-Man domain and show that the agent is able to learn to act optimally, act within the demonstrated constraints, and mix these two functions in complex ways.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Teaching Meaningful Explanations

The adoption of machine learning in high-stakes applications such as healthcare and law has lagged in part because predictions are not accompanied by explanations comprehensible to the domain user, who often holds the ultimate responsibility for decisions and outcomes. In this paper, we propose an approach to generate such explanations in which training data is augmented to include, in addition to features and labels, explanations elicited from domain users. A joint model is then learned to produce both labels and explanations from the input features. This simple idea ensures that explanations are tailored to the complexity expectations and domain knowledge of the consumer. Evaluation spans multiple modeling techniques on a game dataset, a (visual) aesthetics dataset, a chemical odor dataset and a Melanoma dataset showing that our approach is generalizable across domains and algorithms. Results demonstrate that meaningful explanations can be reliably taught to machine learning algorithms, and in some cases, also improve modeling accuracy.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2018

Learning to Teach in Cooperative Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

Collective human knowledge has clearly benefited from the fact that innovations by individuals are taught to others through communication. Similar to human social groups, agents in distributed learning systems would likely benefit from communication to share knowledge and teach skills. The problem of teaching to improve agent learning has been investigated by prior works, but these approaches make assumptions that prevent application of teaching to general multiagent problems, or require domain expertise for problems they can apply to. This learning to teach problem has inherent complexities related to measuring long-term impacts of teaching that compound the standard multiagent coordination challenges. In contrast to existing works, this paper presents the first general framework and algorithm for intelligent agents to learn to teach in a multiagent environment. Our algorithm, Learning to Coordinate and Teach Reinforcement (LeCTR), addresses peer-to-peer teaching in cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning. Each agent in our approach learns both when and what to advise, then uses the received advice to improve local learning. Importantly, these roles are not fixed; these agents learn to assume the role of student and/or teacher at the appropriate moments, requesting and providing advice in order to improve teamwide performance and learning. Empirical comparisons against state-of-the-art teaching methods show that our teaching agents not only learn significantly faster, but also learn to coordinate in tasks where existing methods fail.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2018

Evidence Aggregation for Answer Re-Ranking in Open-Domain Question Answering

A popular recent approach to answering open-domain questions is to first search for question-related passages and then apply reading comprehension models to extract answers. Existing methods usually extract answers from single passages independently. But some questions require a combination of evidence from across different sources to answer correctly. In this paper, we propose two models which make use of multiple passages to generate their answers. Both use an answer-reranking approach which reorders the answer candidates generated by an existing state-of-the-art QA model. We propose two methods, namely, strength-based re-ranking and coverage-based re-ranking, to make use of the aggregated evidence from different passages to better determine the answer. Our models have achieved state-of-the-art results on three public open-domain QA datasets: Quasar-T, SearchQA and the open-domain version of TriviaQA, with about 8 percentage points of improvement over the former two datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Eigenoption Discovery through the Deep Successor Representation

Options in reinforcement learning allow agents to hierarchically decompose a task into subtasks, having the potential to speed up learning and planning. However, autonomously learning effective sets of options is still a major challenge in the field. In this paper we focus on the recently introduced idea of using representation learning methods to guide the option discovery process. Specifically, we look at eigenoptions, options obtained from representations that encode diffusive information flow in the environment. We extend the existing algorithms for eigenoption discovery to settings with stochastic transitions and in which handcrafted features are not available. We propose an algorithm that discovers eigenoptions while learning non-linear state representations from raw pixels. It exploits recent successes in the deep reinforcement learning literature and the equivalence between proto-value functions and the successor representation. We use traditional tabular domains to provide intuition about our approach and Atari 2600 games to demonstrate its potential.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

The Eigenoption-Critic Framework

Eigenoptions (EOs) have been recently introduced as a promising idea for generating a diverse set of options through the graph Laplacian, having been shown to allow efficient exploration. Despite its initial promising results, a couple of issues in current algorithms limit its application, namely: (1) EO methods require two separate steps (eigenoption discovery and reward maximization) to learn a control policy, which can incur a significant amount of storage and computation; (2) EOs are only defined for problems with discrete state-spaces and; (3) it is not easy to take the environment's reward function into consideration when discovering EOs. To addresses these issues, we introduce an algorithm termed eigenoption-critic (EOC) based on the Option-critic (OC) framework [Bacon17], a general hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that allows learning the intra-option policies simultaneously with the policy over options. We also propose a generalization of EOC to problems with continuous state-spaces through the Nyström approximation. EOC can also be seen as extending OC to nonstationary settings, where the discovered options are not tailored for a single task.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2017

UbuntuWorld 1.0 LTS - A Platform for Automated Problem Solving & Troubleshooting in the Ubuntu OS

In this paper, we present UbuntuWorld 1.0 LTS - a platform for developing automated technical support agents in the Ubuntu operating system. Specifically, we propose to use the Bash terminal as a simulator of the Ubuntu environment for a learning-based agent and demonstrate the usefulness of adopting reinforcement learning (RL) techniques for basic problem solving and troubleshooting in this environment. We provide a plug-and-play interface to the simulator as a python package where different types of agents can be plugged in and evaluated, and provide pathways for integrating data from online support forums like AskUbuntu into an automated agent's learning process. Finally, we show that the use of this data significantly improves the agent's learning efficiency. We believe that this platform can be adopted as a real-world test bed for research on automated technical support.

cs.AI↗