SUpervised Self-organIzing map (SUSI)
In many research fields, the sizes of the existing datasets vary widely. Hence, there is a need for machine learning techniques which are well-suited for these different datasets. One possible technique is the self-organizing map (SOM), a type of artificial neural network which is, so far, weakly represented in the field of machine learning. The SOM’s unique characteristic is the neighborhood relationship of the output neurons. This relationship improves the ability of generalization on small datasets. SOMs are mostly applied in unsupervised learning and few studies focus on using SOMs as supervised learning approach. Furthermore, no appropriate SOM package is available with respect to machine learning standards and in the widely used programming language Python. In this paper, we introduce the freely available SUpervised Self-organIzing maps (SUSI) Python package which performs supervised regression and classification. The implementation of SUSI is described with respect to the underlying mathematics. Then, we present first evaluations of the SOM for regression and classification datasets from two different domains of geospatial image analysis. Despite the early stage of its development, the SUSI framework performs well and is characterized by only small performance differences between the training and the test datasets. A comparison of the SUSI framework with existing Python and R packages demonstrates the importance of the SUSI framework. In future work, the SUSI framework will be extended, optimized and upgraded e.g. with tools to better understand and visualize the input data as well as the handling of missing and incomplete data. …

Imitative Model
Imitation learning provides an appealing framework for autonomous control: in many tasks, demonstrations of preferred behavior can be readily obtained from human experts, removing the need for costly and potentially dangerous online data collection in the real world. However, policies learned with imitation learning have limited flexibility to accommodate varied goals at test time. Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) offers considerably more flexibility, since a predictive model learned from data can be used to achieve various goals at test time. However, MBRL suffers from two shortcomings. First, the predictive model does not help to choose desired or safe outcomes — it reasons only about what is possible, not what is preferred. Second, MBRL typically requires additional online data collection to ensure that the model is accurate in those situations that are actually encountered when attempting to achieve test time goals. Collecting this data with a partially trained model can be dangerous and time-consuming. In this paper, we aim to combine the benefits of imitation learning and MBRL, and propose imitative models: probabilistic predictive models able to plan expert-like trajectories to achieve arbitrary goals. We find this method substantially outperforms both direct imitation and MBRL in a simulated autonomous driving task, and can be learned efficiently from a fixed set of expert demonstrations without additional online data collection. We also show our model can flexibly incorporate user-supplied costs as test-time, can plan to sequences of goals, and can even perform well with imprecise goals, including goals on the wrong side of the road. …

Hierarchical Critics Assignment (HCA)
In this paper, we investigate the use of global information to speed up the learning process and increase the cumulative rewards of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks. Within the actor-critic MARL, we introduce multiple cooperative critics from two levels of the hierarchy and propose a hierarchical critic-based multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm. In our approach, the agent is allowed to receive information from local and global critics in a competition task. The agent not only receives low-level details but also consider coordination from high levels that receiving global information to increase operation skills. Here, we define multiple cooperative critics in the top-bottom hierarchy, called the Hierarchical Critics Assignment (HCA) framework. Our experiment, a two-player tennis competition task in the Unity environment, tested HCA multi-agent framework based on Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. The results showed that the HCA- framework outperforms the non-hierarchical critics baseline method for MARL tasks. …

Hessian AWare Quantization (HAWQ)
Model size and inference speed/power have become a major challenge in the deployment of Neural Networks for many applications. A promising approach to address these problems is quantization. However, uniformly quantizing a model to ultra low precision leads to significant accuracy degradation. A novel solution for this is to use mixed-precision quantization, as some parts of the network may allow lower precision as compared to other layers. However, there is no systematic way to determine the precision of different layers. A brute force approach is not feasible for deep networks, as the search space for mixed-precision is exponential in the number of layers. Another challenge is a similar factorial complexity for determining block-wise fine-tuning order when quantizing the model to a target precision. Here, we introduce Hessian AWare Quantization (HAWQ), a novel second-order quantization method to address these problems. HAWQ allows for the automatic selection of the relative quantization precision of each layer, based on the layer’s Hessian spectrum. Moreover, HAWQ provides a deterministic fine-tuning order for quantizing layers, based on second-order information. We show the results of our method on Cifar-10 using ResNet20, and on ImageNet using Inception-V3, ResNet50 and SqueezeNext models. Comparing HAWQ with state-of-the-art shows that we can achieve similar/better accuracy with $8\times$ activation compression ratio on ResNet20, as compared to DNAS~\cite{wu2018mixed}, and up to $1\%$ higher accuracy with up to $14\%$ smaller models on ResNet50 and Inception-V3, compared to recently proposed methods of RVQuant~\cite{park2018value} and HAQ~\cite{wang2018haq}. Furthermore, we show that we can quantize SqueezeNext to just 1MB model size while achieving above $68\%$ top1 accuracy on ImageNet. …
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