In common real-world robotic operations, action and state spaces can be vast and sometimes unknown, and observations are often relatively sparse. How do we learn the full topology of action and state spaces when given only few and sparse observations? Inspired by the properties of grid cells in mammalian brains, we build a generative model that enforces a normalized pairwise distance constraint between the latent space and output space to achieve data-efficient discovery of output spaces. This method achieves substantially better results than prior generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs). Prior models have the common issue of mode collapse and thus fail to explore the full topology of output space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on various datasets both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Recent works have made substantial progress in imposing diversity constraint on the latent space of a generative model. In particular, Liu et. al. @cite_49 proposes the normalized diversification technique that effectively solves the problem of mode collapsing. Building on top of their prior work, we use a similar technique to learn an accurate encoding of action and state spaces in physical manipulation tasks. To our knowledge, our model is the first to use normalized diversification in these applications.
@cite_49
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Generating diverse yet specific data is the goal of the generative adversarial network (GAN), but it suffers from the problem of mode collapse. We introduce the concept of normalized diversity which force the model to preserve the normalized pairwise distance between the sparse samples from a latent parametric distribution and their corresponding high-dimensional outputs. The normalized diversification aims to unfold the manifold of unknown topology and non-uniform distribution, which leads to safe interpolation between valid latent variables. By alternating the maximization over the pairwise distance and updating the total distance (normalizer), we encourage the model to actively explore in the high-dimensional output space. We demonstrate that by combining the normalized diversity loss and the adversarial loss, we generate diverse data without suffering from mode collapsing. Experimental results show that our method achieves consistent improvement on unsupervised image generation, conditional image generation and hand pose estimation over strong baselines. Most conditional generation tasks expect diverse outputs given a single conditional context. However, conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) often focus on the prior conditional information and ignore the input noise vectors, which contribute to the output variations. Recent attempts to resolve the mode collapse issue for cGANs are usually task-specific and computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization term to address the mode collapse issue for cGANs. The proposed method explicitly maximizes the ratio of the distance between generated images with respect to the corresponding latent codes, thus encouraging the generators to explore more minor modes during training. This mode seeking regularization term is readily applicable to various conditional generation tasks without imposing training overhead or modifying the original network structures. We validate the proposed algorithm on three conditional image synthesis tasks including categorical generation, image-to-image translation, and text-to-image synthesis with different baseline models. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed regularization method for improving diversity without loss of quality. We introduce a novel generative autoencoder network model that learns to encode and reconstruct images with high quality and resolution, and supports smooth random sampling from the latent space of the encoder. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are known for their ability to simulate random high-quality images, but they cannot reconstruct existing images. Previous works have attempted to extend GANs to support such inference but, so far, have not delivered satisfactory high-quality results. Instead, we propose the Progressively Growing Generative Autoencoder (Pioneer) network which achieves high-quality reconstruction with (128 128 ) images without requiring a GAN discriminator. We merge recent techniques for progressively building up the parts of the network with the recently introduced adversarial encoder–generator network. The ability to reconstruct input images is crucial in many real-world applications, and allows for precise intelligent manipulation of existing images. We show promising results in image synthesis and inference, with state-of-the-art results in CelebA inference tasks. Understanding user intent is key to designing an effective ranking system in a search engine. In the absence of any explicit knowledge of user intent, search engines want to diversify results to improve user satisfaction. In such a setting, the probability ranking principle-based approach of presenting the most relevant results on top can be sub-optimal, and hence the search engine would like to trade-off relevance for diversity in the results. In analogy to prior work on ranking and clustering systems, we use the axiomatic approach to characterize and design diversification systems. We develop a set of natural axioms that a diversification system is expected to satisfy, and show that no diversification function can satisfy all the axioms simultaneously. We illustrate the use of the axiomatic framework by providing three example diversification objectives that satisfy different subsets of the axioms. We also uncover a rich link to the facility dispersion problem that results in algorithms for a number of diversification objectives. Finally, we propose an evaluation methodology to characterize the objectives and the underlying axioms. We conduct a large scale evaluation of our objectives based on two data sets: a data set derived from the Wikipedia disambiguation pages and a product database. Beyond accuracy, novelty and diversity have attracted increasing interest as quality factors of Recommender Systems (RS) in the last few years. This paper presents work in progress towards the application of intentoriented IR diversity techniques to the RS field, and the formalization of novelty and diversity metrics for RS. Experimental results show that the resulting diversification techniques produce interesting results with respect to the metrics defined here. The recently developed variational autoencoders (VAEs) have proved to be an effective confluence of the rich representational power of neural networks with Bayesian methods. However, most work on VAEs use a rather simple prior over the latent variables such as standard normal distribution, thereby restricting its applications to relatively simple phenomena. In this work, we propose hierarchical nonparametric variational autoencoders, which combines tree-structured Bayesian nonparametric priors with VAEs, to enable infinite flexibility of the latent representation space. Both the neural parameters and Bayesian priors are learned jointly using tailored variational inference. The resulting model induces a hierarchical structure of latent semantic concepts underlying the data corpus, and infers accurate representations of data instances. We apply our model in video representation learning. Our method is able to discover highly interpretable activity hierarchies, and obtain improved clustering accuracy and generalization capacity based on the learned rich representations. We introduce a comprehensive framework for computing diverse (or similar) solutions to logic programs with preferences. Our framework provides a wide spectrum of complete and incomplete methods for solving this task. Apart from proposing several new methods, it also accommodates existing ones and generalizes them to programs with preferences. Interestingly, this is accomplished by integrating and automating several basic ASP techniques - being of general interest even beyond diversification. The enabling factor of this lies in the recent advance of multi-shot ASP solving that provides us with fine-grained control over reasoning processes and abolishes the need for solver modifications and wrappers that were indispensable in previous approaches. Our framework is implemented as an extension to the ASP-based preference handling system asprin. We use the resulting system asprin 2 for an empirical evaluation of the diversification methods comprised in our framework. Unsupervised image translation, which aims in translating two independent sets of images, is challenging in discovering the correct correspondences without paired data. Existing works build upon Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) such that the distribution of the translated images are indistinguishable from the distribution of the target set. However, such set-level constraints cannot learn the instance-level correspondences (e.g. aligned semantic parts in object transfiguration task). This limitation often results in false positives (e.g. geometric or semantic artifacts), and further leads to mode collapse problem. To address the above issues, we propose a novel framework for instance-level image translation by Deep Attention GAN (DA-GAN). Such a design enables DA-GAN to decompose the task of translating samples from two sets into translating instances in a highly-structured latent space. Specifically, we jointly learn a deep attention encoder, and the instance-level correspondences could be consequently discovered through attending on the learned instances. Therefore, the constraints could be exploited on both set-level and instance-level. Comparisons against several state-of-the-arts demonstrate the superiority of our approach, and the broad application capability, e.g, pose morphing, data augmentation, etc., pushes the margin of domain translation problem.1 Unsupervised image translation, which aims in translating two independent sets of images, is challenging in discovering the correct correspondences without paired data. Existing works build upon Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) such that the distribution of the translated images are indistinguishable from the distribution of the target set. However, such set-level constraints cannot learn the instance-level correspondences (e.g. aligned semantic parts in object configuration task). This limitation often results in false positives (e.g. geometric or semantic artifacts), and further leads to mode collapse problem. To address the above issues, we propose a novel framework for instance-level image translation by Deep Attention GAN (DA-GAN). Such a design enables DA-GAN to decompose the task of translating samples from two sets into translating instances in a highly-structured latent space. Specifically, we jointly learn a deep attention encoder, and the instancelevel correspondences could be consequently discovered through attending on the learned instance pairs. Therefore, the constraints could be exploited on both set-level and instance-level. Comparisons against several state-ofthe- arts demonstrate the superiority of our approach, and the broad application capability, e.g, pose morphing, data augmentation, etc., pushes the margin of domain translation problem. In this work we present topic diversification, a novel method designed to balance and diversify personalized recommendation lists in order to reflect the user's complete spectrum of interests. Though being detrimental to average accuracy, we show that our method improves user satisfaction with recommendation lists, in particular for lists generated using the common item-based collaborative filtering algorithm.Our work builds upon prior research on recommender systems, looking at properties of recommendation lists as entities in their own right rather than specifically focusing on the accuracy of individual recommendations. We introduce the intra-list similarity metric to assess the topical diversity of recommendation lists and the topic diversification approach for decreasing the intra-list similarity. We evaluate our method using book recommendation data, including offline analysis on 361, !, 349 ratings and an online study involving more than 2, !, 100 subjects. Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical applications of RL involve learning more than a single task, and prior tasks can be used to inform how exploration should be performed in new tasks. In this work, we study how prior tasks can inform an agent about how to explore effectively in new situations. We introduce a novel gradient-based fast adaptation algorithm -- model agnostic exploration with structured noise (MAESN) -- to learn exploration strategies from prior experience. The prior experience is used both to initialize a policy and to acquire a latent exploration space that can inject structured stochasticity into a policy, producing exploration strategies that are informed by prior knowledge and are more effective than random action-space noise. We show that MAESN is more effective at learning exploration strategies when compared to prior meta-RL methods, RL without learned exploration strategies, and task-agnostic exploration methods. We evaluate our method on a variety of simulated tasks: locomotion with a wheeled robot, locomotion with a quadrupedal walker, and object manipulation. Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many of the current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical applications of RL involve learning more than a single task, and prior tasks can be used to inform how exploration should be performed in new tasks. In this work, we explore how prior tasks can inform an agent about how to explore effectively in new situations. We introduce a novel gradient-based fast adaptation algorithm -- model agnostic exploration with structured noise (MAESN) -- to learn exploration strategies from prior experience. The prior experience is used both to initialize a policy and to acquire a latent exploration space that can inject structured stochasticity into a policy, producing exploration strategies that are informed by prior knowledge and are more effective than random action-space noise. We show that MAESN is more effective at learning exploration strategies when compared to prior meta-RL methods, RL without learned exploration strategies, and task-agnostic exploration methods. We evaluate our method on a variety of simulated tasks: locomotion with a wheeled robot, locomotion with a quadrupedal walker, and object manipulation. Over the last years, there has been substantial progress in robust manipulation in unstructured environments. The long-term goal of our work is to get away from precise, but very expensive robotic systems and to develop affordable, potentially imprecise, self-adaptive manipulator systems that can interactively perform tasks such as playing with children. In this paper, we demonstrate how a low-cost off-the-shelf robotic system can learn closed-loop policies for a stacking task in only a handful of trials-from scratch. Our manipulator is inaccurate and provides no pose feedback. For learning a controller in the work space of a Kinect-style depth camera, we use a model-based reinforcement learning technique. Our learning method is data efficient, reduces model bias, and deals with several noise sources in a principled way during long-term planning. We present a way of incorporating state-space constraints into the learning process and analyze the learning gain by exploiting the sequential structure of the stacking task. Deep latent variable models, trained using variational autoencoders or generative adversarial networks, are now a key technique for representation learning of continuous structures. However, applying similar methods to discrete structures, such as text sequences or discretized images, has proven to be more challenging. In this work, we propose a flexible method for training deep latent variable models of discrete structures. Our approach is based on the recently-proposed Wasserstein autoencoder (WAE) which formalizes the adversarial autoencoder (AAE) as an optimal transport problem. We first extend this framework to model discrete sequences, and then further explore different learned priors targeting a controllable representation. This adversarially regularized autoencoder (ARAE) allows us to generate natural textual outputs as well as perform manipulations in the latent space to induce change in the output space. Finally we show that the latent representation can be trained to perform unaligned textual style transfer, giving improvements both in automatic human evaluation compared to existing methods. Building a common representation for several related data sets is an important problem in multi-view learning. CCA and its extensions have shown that they are effective in finding the shared variation among all data sets. However, these models generally fail to exploit the common structure of the data when the views are with private information. Recently, methods explicitly modeling the information into shared part and private parts have been proposed, but they presume to know the prior knowledge about the latent space, which is usually impossible to obtain. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model, which could simultaneously learn the structure of the latent space whilst factorize the information correctly, therefore the prior knowledge of the latent space is unnecessary. Furthermore, as a probabilistic model, our method is able to deal with missing data problem in a natural way. We show that our approach attains the performance of state-of-art methods on the task of human pose estimation when the motion capture view is completely missing, and significantly improves the inference accuracy with only a few observed data. Many image-to-image translation problems are ambiguous, as a single input image may correspond to multiple possible outputs. In this work, we aim to model a of possible outputs in a conditional generative modeling setting. The ambiguity of the mapping is distilled in a low-dimensional latent vector, which can be randomly sampled at test time. A generator learns to map the given input, combined with this latent code, to the output. We explicitly encourage the connection between output and the latent code to be invertible. This helps prevent a many-to-one mapping from the latent code to the output during training, also known as the problem of mode collapse, and produces more diverse results. We explore several variants of this approach by employing different training objectives, network architectures, and methods of injecting the latent code. Our proposed method encourages bijective consistency between the latent encoding and output modes. We present a systematic comparison of our method and other variants on both perceptual realism and diversity. Many image-to-image translation problems are ambiguous, as a single input image may correspond to multiple possible outputs. In this work, we aim to model a distribution of possible outputs in a conditional generative modeling setting. The ambiguity of the mapping is distilled in a low-dimensional latent vector, which can be randomly sampled at test time. A generator learns to map the given input, combined with this latent code, to the output. We explicitly encourage the connection between output and the latent code to be invertible. This helps prevent a many-to-one mapping from the latent code to the output during training, also known as the problem of mode collapse, and produces more diverse results. We explore several variants of this approach by employing different training objectives, network architectures, and methods of injecting the latent code. Our proposed method encourages bijective consistency between the latent encoding and output modes. We present a systematic comparison of our method and other variants on both perceptual realism and diversity. Representation learning systems typically rely on massive amounts of labeled data in order to be trained to high accuracy. Recently, high-dimensional parametric models like neural networks have succeeded in building rich representations using either compressive, reconstructive or supervised criteria. However, the semantic structure inherent in observations is oftentimes lost in the process. Human perception excels at understanding semantics but cannot always be expressed in terms of labels. Thus, or , for example crowdsourcing, are often employed to generate similarity constraints using an implicit similarity function encoded in human perception. In this work we propose to combine with a in order to transfer implicit privileged oracle knowledge into explicit nonlinear Bayesian latent factor models of the observations. We use a fast variational algorithm to learn the joint model and demonstrate applicability to a well-known image dataset. We show how implicit triplet information can provide rich information to learn representations that outperform previous metric learning approaches as well as generative models without this side-information in a variety of predictive tasks. In addition, we illustrate that the proposed approach compartmentalizes the latent spaces semantically which allows interpretation of the latent variables. In this paper, we study the problem of dynamic user profiling in Twitter. We address the problem by proposing a dynamic user and word embedding model (DUWE), a scalable black-box variational inference algorithm, and a streaming keyword diversification model (SKDM). DUWE dynamically tracks the semantic representations of users and words over time and models their embeddings in the same space so that their similarities can be effectively measured. Our inference algorithm works with a convex objective function that ensures the robustness of the learnt embeddings. SKDM aims at retrieving top-K relevant and diversified keywords to profile users' dynamic interests. Experiments on a Twitter dataset demonstrate that our proposed embedding algorithms outperform state-of-the-art non-dynamic and dynamic embedding and topic models. We present a modification of “Normalized Cuts” to incorporate priors which can be used for constrained image segmentation. Compared to previous generalizations of “Normalized Cuts” which incorporate constraints, our technique has two advantages. First, we seek solutions which are sufficiently “correlated” with priors which allows us to use noisy top-down information, for example from an object detector. Second, given the spectral solution of the unconstrained problem, the solution of the constrained one can be computed in small additional time, which allows us to run the algorithm in an interactive mode. We compare our algorithm to other graph cut based algorithms and highlight the advantages.