arXiv subjects

Youngki Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Youngki Lee.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Toddler-Guidance Learning: Impacts of Critical Period on Multimodal AI Agents

Critical periods are phases during which a toddler's brain develops in spurts. To promote children's cognitive development, proper guidance is critical in this stage. However, it is not clear whether such a critical period also exists for the training of AI agents. Similar to human toddlers, well-timed guidance and multimodal interactions might significantly enhance the training efficiency of AI agents as well. To validate this hypothesis, we adapt this notion of critical periods to learning in AI agents and investigate the critical period in the virtual environment for AI agents. We formalize the critical period and Toddler-guidance learning in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Then, we built up a toddler-like environment with VECA toolkit to mimic human toddlers' learning characteristics. We study three discrete levels of mutual interaction: weak-mentor guidance (sparse reward), moderate mentor guidance (helper-reward), and mentor demonstration (behavioral cloning). We also introduce the EAVE dataset consisting of 30,000 real-world images to fully reflect the toddler's viewpoint. We evaluate the impact of critical periods on AI agents from two perspectives: how and when they are guided best in both uni- and multimodal learning. Our experimental results show that both uni- and multimodal agents with moderate mentor guidance and critical period on 1 million and 2 million training steps show a noticeable improvement. We validate these results with transfer learning on the EAVE dataset and find the performance advancement on the same critical period and the guidance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

VECA : A Toolkit for Building Virtual Environments to Train and Test Human-like Agents

Building human-like agent, which aims to learn and think like human intelligence, has long been an important research topic in AI. To train and test human-like agents, we need an environment that imposes the agent to rich multimodal perception and allows comprehensive interactions for the agent, while also easily extensible to develop custom tasks. However, existing approaches do not support comprehensive interaction with the environment or lack variety in modalities. Also, most of the approaches are difficult or even impossible to implement custom tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel VR-based toolkit, VECA, which enables building fruitful virtual environments to train and test human-like agents. In particular, VECA provides a humanoid agent and an environment manager, enabling the agent to receive rich human-like perception and perform comprehensive interactions. To motivate VECA, we also provide 24 interactive tasks, which represent (but are not limited to) four essential aspects in early human development: joint-level locomotion and control, understanding contexts of objects, multimodal learning, and multi-agent learning. To show the usefulness of VECA on training and testing human-like learning agents, we conduct experiments on VECA and show that users can build challenging tasks for engaging human-like algorithms, and the features supported by VECA are critical on training human-like agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Learning task-agnostic representation via toddler-inspired learning

One of the inherent limitations of current AI systems, stemming from the passive learning mechanisms (e.g., supervised learning), is that they perform well on labeled datasets but cannot deduce knowledge on their own. To tackle this problem, we derive inspiration from a highly intentional learning system via action: the toddler. Inspired by the toddler's learning procedure, we design an interactive agent that can learn and store task-agnostic visual representation while exploring and interacting with objects in the virtual environment. Experimental results show that such obtained representation was expandable to various vision tasks such as image classification, object localization, and distance estimation tasks. In specific, the proposed model achieved 100%, 75.1% accuracy and 1.62% relative error, respectively, which is noticeably better than autoencoder-based model (99.7%, 66.1%, 1.95%), and also comparable with those of supervised models (100%, 87.3%, 0.71%).

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Experiences & Challenges with Server-Side WiFi Indoor Localization Using Existing Infrastructure

Real-world deployments of WiFi-based indoor localization in large public venues are few and far between as most state-of-the-art solutions require either client or infrastructure-side changes. Hence, even though high location accuracy is possible with these solutions, they are not practical due to cost and/or client adoption reasons. Majority of the public venues use commercial controller-managed WLAN solutions, %provided by Aruba, Cisco, etc., that neither allow client changes nor infrastructure changes. In fact, for such venues we have observed highly heterogeneous devices with very low adoption rates for client-side apps. In this paper, we present our experiences in deploying a scalable location system for such venues. We show that server-side localization is not trivial and present two unique challenges associated with this approach, namely Cardinality Mismatch and High Client Scan Latency. The "Mismatch" challenge results in a significant mismatch between the set of access points (APs) reporting a client in the offline and online phases, while the "Latency" challenge results in a low number of APs reporting data for any particular client. We collect three weeks of detailed ground truth data (~200 landmarks), from a WiFi setup that has been deployed for more than four years, to provide evidences for the extent and understanding the impact of these problems. Our analysis of real-world client devices reveal that the current trend for the clients is to reduce scans, thereby adversely impacting their localization accuracy. We analyze how localization is impacted when scans are minimal. We propose heuristics to alleviate reduction in the accuracy despite lesser scans. Besides the number of scans, we summarize the other challenges and pitfalls of real deployments which hamper the localization accuracy.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

BreathRNNet: Breathing Based Authentication on Resource-Constrained IoT Devices using RNNs

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown promising results in audio and speech processing applications due to their strong capabilities in modelling sequential data. In many applications, RNNs tend to outperform conventional models based on GMM/UBMs and i-vectors. Increasing popularity of IoT devices makes a strong case for implementing RNN based inferences for applications such as acoustics based authentication, voice commands, and edge analytics for smart homes. Nonetheless, the feasibility and performance of RNN based inferences on resources-constrained IoT devices remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using RNNs for an end-to-end authentication system based on breathing acoustics. We evaluate the performance of RNN models on three types of devices; smartphone, smartwatch, and Raspberry Pi and show that unlike CNN models, RNN models can be easily ported onto resource-constrained devices without a significant loss in accuracy.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2004

Common Scaling Patterns in Intertrade Times of U. S. Stocks

We analyze the sequence of time intervals between consecutive stock trades of thirty companies representing eight sectors of the U. S. economy over a period of four years. For all companies we find that: (i) the probability density function of intertrade times may be fit by a Weibull distribution; (ii) when appropriately rescaled the probability densities of all companies collapse onto a single curve implying a universal functional form; (iii) the intertrade times exhibit power-law correlated behavior within a trading day and a consistently greater degree of correlation over larger time scales, in agreement with the correlation behavior of the absolute price returns for the corresponding company, and (iv) the magnitude series of intertrade time increments is characterized by long-range power-law correlations suggesting the presence of nonlinear features in the trading dynamics, while the sign series is anti-correlated at small scales. Our results suggest that independent of industry sector, market capitalization and average level of trading activity, the series of intertrade times exhibit possibly universal scaling patterns, which may relate to a common mechanism underlying the trading dynamics of diverse companies. Further, our observation of long-range power-law correlations and a parallel with the crossover in the scaling of absolute price returns for each individual stock, support the hypothesis that the dynamics of transaction times may play a role in the process of price formation.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2003

Minimal Brownian Ratchet: An Exactly Solvable Model

We develop an exactly-solvable three-state discrete-time minimal Brownian ratchet (MBR), where the transition probabilities between states are asymmetric. By solving the master equations we obtain the steady-state probabilities. Generally the steady-state solution does not display detailed balance, giving rise to an induced directional motion in the MBR. For a reduced two-dimensional parameter space we find the null-curve on which the net current vanishes and detailed balance holds. A system on this curve is said to be balanced. On the null-curve, an additional source of external random noise is introduced to show that a directional motion can be induced under the zero overall driving force. We also indicate the off-balance behavior with biased random noise.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2001

Scale-free Network in Financial Correlations

We study the cross-correlations in stock price changes between the S&P 500 companies by introducing a weighted random graph, where all vertices (companies) are fully connected, and each edge is weighted. The weight assigned to each edge is given by the normalized covariance of the two modified returns connected, so that it is ranged from -1 to 1. Here the modified return means the deviation of a return from its average over all companies. We define influence-strength at each vertex as the sum of the weights on the edges incident upon that vertex. Then we found that the influence-strength distribution in its absolute magnitude $|s|$ follows a power-law, $P(|s|)\sim |s|^{-δ}$, with exponent $δ\approx 1.8(1)$.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2000

Systems with Correlations in the Variance: Generating Power-Law Tails in Probability Distributions

We study how the presence of correlations in physical variables contributes to the form of probability distributions. We investigate a process with correlations in the variance generated by (i) a Gaussian or (ii) a truncated Lévy distribution. For both (i) and (ii), we find that due to the correlations in the variance, the process ``dynamically'' generates power-law tails in the distributions, whose exponents can be controlled through the way the correlations in the variance are introduced. For (ii), we find that the process can extend a truncated distribution {\it beyond the truncation cutoff}, which leads to a crossover between a Lévy stable power law and the present ``dynamically-generated'' power law. We show that the process can explain the crossover behavior recently observed in the $S&P500$ stock index.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2000

Flow Between Two Sites on a Percolation Cluster

We study the flow of fluid in porous media in dimensions $d=2$ and 3. The medium is modeled by bond percolation on a lattice of $L^d$ sites, while the flow front is modeled by tracer particles driven by a pressure difference between two fixed sites (``wells'') separated by Euclidean distance $r$. We investigate the distribution function of the shortest path connecting the two sites, and propose a scaling {\it Ansatz} that accounts for the dependence of this distribution (i) on the size of the system, $L$, and (ii) on the bond occupancy probability, $p$. We confirm by extensive simulations that the {\it Ansatz} holds for $d=2$ and 3, and calculate the relevant scaling parameters. We also study two dynamical quantities: the minimal traveling time of a tracer particle between the wells and the length of the path corresponding to the minimal traveling time ``fastest path'', which is not identical to the shortest path. A scaling {\it Ansatz} for these dynamical quantities also includes the effect of finite system size $L$ and off-critical bond occupation probability $p$. We find that the scaling form for the distribution functions for these dynamical quantities for $d=2$ and 3 is similar to that for the shortest path but with different critical exponents. The scaling form is represented as the product of a power law and three exponential cutoff functions. We summarize our results in a table which contains estimates for all parameters which characterize the scaling form for the shortest path and the minimal traveling time in 2 and 3 dimensions; these parameters are the fractal dimension, the power law exponent, and the constants and exponents that characterize the exponential cutoff functions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv1999

Power-law Distribution of Family Names in Japanese Societies

We study the frequency distribution of family names. From a common data base, we count the number of people who share the same family name. This is the size of the family. We find that (i) the total number of different family names in a society scales as a power-law of the population, (ii) the total number of family names of the same size decreases as the size increases with a power-law and (iii) the relation between size and rank of a family name also shows a power-law. These scaling properties are found to be consistent for five different regional communities in Japan.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv1999

Dependence of Conductance on Percolation Backbone Mass

On two-dimensional percolation clusters at the percolation threshold, we study $<σ(M_B,r)>$, the average conductance of the backbone, defined by two points separated by Euclidean distance $r$, of mass $M_B$. We find that with increasing $M_B$ and for fixed r, $<σ(M_B,r)>$ asymptotically {\it decreases} to a constant, in contrast with the behavior of homogeneous sytems and non-random fractals (such as the Sierpinski gasket) in which conductance increases with increasing $M_B$. We explain this behavior by studying the distribution of shortest paths between the two points on clusters with a given $M_B$. We also study the dependence of conductance on $M_B$ slightly above the percolation threshold.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv1999

Scaling of the distribution of shortest paths in percolation

We present a scaling hypothesis for the distribution function of the shortest paths connecting any two points on a percolating cluster which accounts for {\it (i)} the effect of the finite size of the system, and {\it (ii)} the dependence of this distribution on the site occupancy probability $p$. We test the hypothesis for the case of two-dimensional percolation.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv1999

Traveling time and traveling length for flow in porous media

We study traveling time and traveling length for tracer dispersion in porous media. We model porous media by two-dimensional bond percolation, and we model flow by tracer particles driven by a pressure difference between two points separated by Euclidean distance $r$. We find that the minimal traveling time $t_{min}$ scales as $t_{min} \sim r^{1.40}$, which is different from the scaling of the most probable traveling time, ${\tilde t} \sim r^{1.64}$. We also calculate the length of the path corresponding to the minimal traveling time and find $\ell_{min} \sim r^{1.13}$ and that the most probable traveling length scales as ${\tilde \ell} \sim r^{1.21}$. We present the relevant distribution functions and scaling relations.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv1999

Scale-invariant Truncated Lévy Process

We develop a scale-invariant truncated Lévy (STL) process to describe physical systems characterized by correlated stochastic variables. The STL process exhibits Lévy stability for the probability density, and hence shows scaling properties (as observed in empirical data); it has the advantage that all moments are finite (and so accounts for the empirical scaling of the moments). To test the potential utility of the STL process, we analyze financial data.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv1998

Universal features in the growth dynamics of complex organizations

We analyze the fluctuations in the gross domestic product (GDP) of 152 countries for the period 1950--1992. We find that (i) the distribution of annual growth rates for countries of a given GDP decays with ``fatter'' tails than for a Gaussian, and (ii) the width of the distribution scales as a power law of GDP with a scaling exponent $β\approx 0.15$. Both findings are in surprising agreement with results on firm growth. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the evolution of organizations with complex structure is governed by similar growth mechanisms.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗