What Can You Do with a Rock? Affordance Extraction via Word Embeddings

Autonomous agents must often detect affordances: the set of behaviors enabled by a situation. Affordance extraction is particularly helpful in domains with large action spaces, allowing the agent to prune its search space by avoiding futile behaviors. This paper presents a method for affordance extraction via word embeddings trained on a tagged Wikipedia corpus. The resulting word vectors are treated as a common knowledge database which can be queried using linear algebra. We apply this method to a reinforcement learning agent in a text-only environment and show that affordance-based action selection improves performance in most cases. Our method increases the computational complexity of each learning step but significantly reduces the total number of steps needed. In addition, the agent's action selections begin to resemble those a human would choose.

Clustering-Based Relational Unsupervised Representation Learning with an Explicit Distributed Representation

The goal of unsupervised representation learning is to extract a new representation of data, such that solving many different tasks becomes easier. Existing methods typically focus on vectorized data and offer little support for relational data, which additionally describes relationships among instances. In this work we introduce an approach for relational unsupervised representation learning. Viewing a relational dataset as a hypergraph, new features are obtained by clustering vertices and hyperedges. To find a representation suited for many relational learning tasks, a wide range of similarities between relational objects is considered, e.g. feature and structural similarities. We experimentally evaluate the proposed approach and show that models learned on such latent representations perform better, have lower complexity, and outperform the existing approaches on classification tasks.

Ontology-Mediated Querying with the Description Logic EL: Trichotomy and Linear Datalog Rewritability

We consider ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) based on an EL ontology and an atomic query (AQ), provide an ultimately fine-grained analysis of data complexity and study rewritability into linear Datalog-aiming to capture linear recursion in SQL. Our main results are that every such OMQ is in AC0, NL-complete or PTime-complete, and that containment in NL coincides with rewritability into linear Datalog (whereas containment in AC0 coincides with rewritability into first-order logic). We establish natural characterizations of the three cases, show that deciding linear Datalog rewritability (as well as the mentioned complexities) is ExpTime-complete, give a way to construct linear Datalog rewritings when they exist, and prove that there is no constant bound on the arity of IDB relations in linear Datalog rewritings.

Aggressive, Tense or Shy? Identifying Personality Traits from Crowd Videos

We present a real-time algorithm to automatically classify the behavior or personality of a pedestrian based on his or her movements in a crowd video. Our classification criterion is based on Personality Trait theory. We present a statistical scheme that dynamically learns the behavior of every pedestrian and computes its motion model. This model is combined with global crowd characteristics to compute the movement patterns and motion dynamics and use them for crowd prediction. Our learning scheme is general and we highlight its performance in identifying the personality of different pedestrians in low and high density crowd videos. We also evaluate the accuracy by comparing the results with a user study.

A Robust Noise Resistant Algorithm for POI Identification from Flickr Data

Point of Interests (POI) identification using social media data (e.g. Flickr, Microblog) is one of the most popular research topics in recent years. However, there exist large amounts of noises (POI irrelevant data) in such crowd-contributed collections. Traditional solutions to this problem is to set a global density threshold and remove the data point as noise if its density is lower than the threshold. However, the density values vary significantly among POIs. As the result, some POIs with relatively lower density could not be identified. To solve the problem, we propose a technique based on the local drastic changes of the data density. First we define the local maxima of the density function as the Urban POIs, and the gradient ascent algorithm is exploited to assign data points into different clusters. To remove noises, we incorporate the Laplacian Zero-Crossing points along the gradient ascent process as the boundaries of the POI. Points located outside the POI region are regarded as noises. Then the technique is extended into the geographical and textual joint space so that it can make use of the heterogeneous features of social media. The experimental results show the significance of the proposed approach in removing noises.

On Thompson Sampling and Asymptotic Optimality

We discuss some recent results on Thompson sampling for nonparametric reinforcement learning in countable classes of general stochastic environments. These environments can be non-Markovian, non-ergodic, and partially observable. We show that Thompson sampling learns the environment class in the sense that (1) asymptotically its value converges in mean to the optimal value and (2) given a recoverability assumption regret is sublinear. We conclude with a discussion about optimality in reinforcement learning.

Robust Multilingual Named Entity Recognition with Shallow Semi-supervised Features (Extended Abstract)

We present a multilingual Named Entity Recognition approach based on a robust and general set of features across languages and datasets. Our system combines shallow local information with clustering semi-supervised features induced on large amounts of unlabeled text. Understanding via empiricalexperimentation how to effectively combine various types of clustering features allows us to seamlessly export our system to other datasets and languages. The result is a simple but highly competitive system which obtains state of the art results across five languages and twelve datasets. The results are reported on standard shared task evaluation data such as CoNLL for English, Spanish and Dutch. Furthermore, and despite the lack of linguistically motivated features, we also report best results for languages such as Basque and German. In addition, we demonstrate that our method also obtains very competitive results even when the amount of supervised data is cut by half, alleviating the dependency on manually annotated data. Finally, the results show that our emphasis on clustering features is crucial to develop robust out-of-domain models. The system and models are freely available to facilitate its use and guarantee the reproducibility of results.

Using Constraint Programming to solve a Cryptanalytic Problem

We describe Constraint Programming (CP) models to solve a cryptanalytic problem: the chosen key differential attack against the standard block cipher AES. We show that CP solvers are able to solve these problems quicker than dedicated cryptanalysis tools, and we prove that a solution claimed to be optimal in two recent cryptanalysis papers is not optimal by providing a better solution.

Unsupervised Learning via Total Correlation Explanation

Learning by children and animals occurs effortlessly and largely without obvious supervision. Successes in automating supervised learning have not translated to the more ambiguous realm of unsupervised learning where goals and labels are not provided. Barlow (1961) suggested that the signal that brains leverage for unsupervised learning is dependence, or redundancy, in the sensory environment. Dependence can be characterized using the information-theoretic multivariate mutual information measure called total correlation. The principle of Total Cor-relation Ex-planation (CorEx) is to learn representations of data that "explain" as much dependence in the data as possible. We review some manifestations of this principle along with successes in unsupervised learning problems across diverse domains including human behavior, biology, and language.

Image Gradient-based Joint Direct Visual Odometry for Stereo Camera

Visual odometry is an important research problem for computer vision and robotics. In general, the feature-based visual odometry methods heavily rely on the accurate correspondences between local salient points, while the direct approaches could make full use of whole image and perform dense 3D reconstruction simultaneously. However, the direct visual odometry usually suffers from the drawback of getting stuck at local optimum especially with large displacement, which may lead to the inferior results. To tackle this critical problem, we propose a novel scheme for stereo odometry in this paper, which is able to improve the convergence with more accurate pose. The key of our approach is a dual Jacobian optimization that is fused into a multi-scale pyramid scheme. Moreover, we introduce a gradient-based feature representation, which enjoys the merit of being robust to illumination changes. Furthermore, a joint direct odometry approach is proposed to incorporate the information from the last frame and previous keyframes. We have conducted the experimental evaluation on the challenging KITTI odometry benchmark, whose promising results show that the proposed algorithm is very effective for stereo visual odometry.