30 accepted papers
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a powerful and theoretically sound methodology for sequential decision-making. However, it is not directly applicable to Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to the inaccessibility of explicit action-value functions. We address this challenge by introducing a novel approach…
Standard meta-learning for representation learning aims to find a common representation to be shared across multiple tasks. The effectiveness of these methods is often limited when the nuances of the tasks’ distribution cannot be captured by a single representation. In this work we overcome this iss…
The problem of learning functions over spaces of probabilities - or distribution regression - is gaining significant interest in the machine learning community. The main challenge in these settings is to identify a suitable representation capturing all relevant properties of a distribution. The well…
We study a class of dynamical systems modelled as stationary Markov chains that admit an invariant distribution via the corresponding transfer or Koopman operator. While data-driven algorithms to reconstruct such operators are well known, their relationship with statistical learning is largely unexp…
Measures of similarity (or dissimilarity) are a key ingredient to many machine learning algorithms. We introduce DID, a pairwise dissimilarity measure applicable to a wide range of data spaces, which leverages the data’s internal structure to be invariant to diffeomorphisms. We prove that DID enjoys…
Deep imitation learning requires many expert demonstrations, which can be hard to obtain, especially when many tasks are involved. However, different tasks often share similarities, so learning them jointly can greatly benefit them and alleviate the need for many demonstrations. But, joint multi-tas…
Deep Imitation Learning requires a large number of expert demonstrations, which are not always easy to obtain, especially for complex tasks. A way to overcome this shortage of labels is through data augmentation. However, this cannot be easily applied to control tasks due to the sequential nature of…
Finding a good way to model probability densities is key to probabilistic inference. An ideal model should be able to concisely approximate any probability while being also compatible with two main operations: multiplications of two models (product rule) and marginalization with respect to a subset…
With the recent advances in machine learning, problems that traditionally would require accurate modeling to be solved analytically can now be successfully approached with data-driven strategies. Among these, computing the inverse kinematics of a redundant robot arm poses a significant challenge due
Few-shot learning is a central problem in meta-learning, where learners must quickly adapt to new tasks given limited training data. Recently, feature pre-training has become a ubiquitous component in state-of-the-art meta-learning methods and is shown to provide significant performance improvement.…
Developing learning methods which do not discriminate subgroups in the population is a central goal of algorithmic fairness. One way to reach this goal is by modifying the data representation in order to meet certain fairness constraints. In this work we measure fairness according to demographic par…
Geometric representation learning has shown great promise for important tasks inartificial intelligence and machine learning. However, an open problem is yethow to integrate non-Euclidean representations with standard machine learningmethods.In this work, we consider the task of regression onto hype…
The goal of optimization-based meta-learning is to find a single initialization shared across a distribution of tasks to speed up the process of learning new tasks. Conditional meta-learning seeks task-specific initialization to better capture complex task distributions and improve performance. Howe…
Biased regularization and fine tuning are two recent meta-learning approaches. They have been shown to be effective to tackle distributions of tasks, in which the tasks’ target vectors are all close to a common meta-parameter vector. However, these methods may perform poorly on heterogeneous environ…
We study the problem of learning-to-learn: infer- ring a learning algorithm that works well on a family of tasks sampled from an unknown distribution. As class of algorithms we consider Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) on the true risk regularized by the square euclidean distance from a bias vector…
We study the interplay between surrogate methods for structured prediction and techniques from multitask learning designed to leverage relationships between surrogate outputs. We propose an efficient algorithm based on trace norm regularization which, differently from previous methods, does not requ…
Key to structured prediction is exploiting the problem's structure to simplify the learning process. A major challenge arises when data exhibit a local structure (i.e., are made ``by parts'') that can be leveraged to better approximate the relation between (parts of) the input and (parts of) the out…
We study the problem of learning a series of tasks in a fully online Meta-Learning setting. The goal is to exploit similarities among the tasks to incrementally adapt an inner online algorithm in order to incur a low averaged cumulative error over the tasks. We focus on a family of inner algorithms…
We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert’s reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed by reinforcement learning is indirect and may be computation…
We present a novel algorithm to estimate the barycenter of arbitrary probability distributions with respect to the Sinkhorn divergence. Based on a Frank-Wolfe optimization strategy, our approach proceeds by populating the support of the barycenter incrementally, without requiring any pre-allocation.…
Applications of optimal transport have recently gained remarkable attention as a result of the computational advantages of entropic regularization. However, in most situations the Sinkhorn approximation to the Wasserstein distance is replaced by a regularized version that is less accurate but easy…
The problem of learning-to-learn (LTL) or meta-learning is gaining increasing attention due to recent empirical evidence of its effectiveness in applications. The goal addressed in LTL is to select an algorithm that works well on tasks sampled from a meta-distribution. In this work, we consider the…
Structured prediction provides a general framework to deal with supervised problems where the outputs have semantically rich structure. While classical approaches consider finite, albeit potentially huge, output spaces, in this paper we discuss how structured prediction can be extended to a continuo…
Key to multitask learning is exploiting the relationships between different tasks to improve prediction performance. Most previous methods have focused on the case where tasks relations can be modeled as linear operators and regularization approaches can be used successfully. However, in practice as…
We consider object recognition in the context of lifelong learning, where a robotic agent learns to discriminate between a growing number of object classes as it accumulates experience about the environment. We propose an incremental variant of the Regularized Least Squares for Classification (RLSC)…
Numerous computer vision problems such as stereo depth estimation, object-class segmentation and foreground/background segmentation can be formulated as per-pixel image labeling tasks. Given one or many images as input, the desired output of these methods is usually a spatially smooth assignment of…
We propose and analyze a regularization approach for structured prediction problems. We characterize a large class of loss functions that allows to naturally embed structured outputs in a linear space. We exploit this fact to design learning algorithms using a surrogate loss approach and regulari…
The development of reliable and robust visual recognition systems is a main challenge towards the deployment of autonomous robotic agents in unconstrained environments. Learning to recognize objects requires image representations that are discriminative to relevant information while being invariant…
Reducing the amount of human supervision is a key problem in machine learning and a natural approach is that of exploiting the relations (structure) among different tasks. This is the idea at the core of multi-task learning. In this context a fundamental question is how to incorporate the tasks stru…
Multi-task learning is a natural approach for computer vision applications that require the simultaneous solution of several distinct but related problems, e.g. object detection, classification, tracking of multiple agents, or denoising, to name a few. The key idea is that exploring task relatedness…