Kian Hsiang Low

Zijian Zhou, Xinyi Xu, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim et al.

The Shapley value (SV) is adopted in various scenarios in machine learning (ML), including data valuation, agent valuation, and feature attribution, as it satisfies their fairness requirements. However, as exact SVs are infeasible to compute in practice, SV estimates are approximated instead. This approximation step raises an important question: do the SV estimates preserve the fairness guarantees of exact SVs? We observe that the fairness guarantees of exact SVs are too restrictive for SV estimates. Thus, we generalise Shapley fairness to probably approximate Shapley fairness and propose fidelity score, a metric to measure the variation of SV estimates, that determines how probable the fairness guarantees hold. Our last theoretical contribution is a novel greedy active estimation (GAE) algorithm that will maximise the lowest fidelity score and achieve a better fairness guarantee than the de facto Monte-Carlo estimation. We empirically verify GAE outperforms several existing methods in guaranteeing fairness while remaining competitive in estimation accuracy in various ML scenarios using real-world datasets.

Jie Fu, Hongyin Luo, Jiashi Feng et al.

The performance of deep neural networks is well-known to be sensitive to the setting of their hyperparameters. Recent advances in reverse-mode automatic differentiation allow for optimizing hyperparameters with gradients. The standard way of computing these gradients involves a forward and backward pass of computations. However, the backward pass usually needs to consume unaffordable memory to store all the intermediate variables to exactly reverse the forward training procedure. In this work we propose a simple but effective method, DrMAD, to distill the knowledge of the forward pass into a shortcut path, through which we approximately reverse the training trajectory. Experiments on several image benchmark datasets show that DrMAD is at least 45 times faster and consumes 100 times less memory compared to state-of-the-art methods for optimizing hyperparameters with minimal compromise to its effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, DrMAD is the first research attempt to make it practical to automatically tune thousands of hyperparameters of deep neural networks. The code can be downloaded from https://github.com/bigaidream-projects/drmad

Zhongxiang Dai, Kian Hsiang Low, Patrick Jaillet

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a prominent approach to optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. The massive computational capability of edge devices such as mobile phones, coupled with privacy concerns, has led to a surging interest in federated learning (FL) which focuses on collaborative training of deep neural networks (DNNs) via first-order optimization techniques. However, some common machine learning tasks such as hyperparameter tuning of DNNs lack access to gradients and thus require zeroth-order/black-box optimization. This hints at the possibility of extending BO to the FL setting (FBO) for agents to collaborate in these black-box optimization tasks. This paper presents federated Thompson sampling (FTS) which overcomes a number of key challenges of FBO and FL in a principled way: We (a) use random Fourier features to approximate the Gaussian process surrogate model used in BO, which naturally produces the parameters to be exchanged between agents, (b) design FTS based on Thompson sampling, which significantly reduces the number of parameters to be exchanged, and (c) provide a theoretical convergence guarantee that is robust against heterogeneous agents, which is a major challenge in FL and FBO. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of FTS in terms of communication efficiency, computational efficiency, and practical performance.

Zhongxiang Dai, Yizhou Chen, Kian Hsiang Low et al.

This paper presents a recursive reasoning formalism of Bayesian optimization (BO) to model the reasoning process in the interactions between boundedly rational, self-interested agents with unknown, complex, and costly-to-evaluate payoff functions in repeated games, which we call Recursive Reasoning-Based BO (R2-B2). Our R2-B2 algorithm is general in that it does not constrain the relationship among the payoff functions of different agents and can thus be applied to various types of games such as constant-sum, general-sum, and common-payoff games. We prove that by reasoning at level 2 or more and at one level higher than the other agents, our R2-B2 agent can achieve faster asymptotic convergence to no regret than that without utilizing recursive reasoning. We also propose a computationally cheaper variant of R2-B2 called R2-B2-Lite at the expense of a weaker convergence guarantee. The performance and generality of our R2-B2 algorithm are empirically demonstrated using synthetic games, adversarial machine learning, and multi-agent reinforcement learning.

Dmitrii Kharkovskii, Chun Kai Ling, Kian Hsiang Low

This paper presents a multi-staged approach to nonmyopic adaptive Gaussian process optimization (GPO) for Bayesian optimization (BO) of unknown, highly complex objective functions that, in contrast to existing nonmyopic adaptive BO algorithms, exploits the notion of macro-actions for scaling up to a further lookahead to match up to a larger available budget. To achieve this, we generalize GP upper confidence bound to a new acquisition function defined w.r.t. a nonmyopic adaptive macro-action policy, which is intractable to be optimized exactly due to an uncountable set of candidate outputs. The contribution of our work here is thus to derive a nonmyopic adaptive epsilon-Bayes-optimal macro-action GPO (epsilon-Macro-GPO) policy. To perform nonmyopic adaptive BO in real time, we then propose an asymptotically optimal anytime variant of our epsilon-Macro-GPO policy with a performance guarantee. We empirically evaluate the performance of our epsilon-Macro-GPO policy and its anytime variant in BO with synthetic and real-world datasets.

Tong Teng, Jie Chen, Yehong Zhang et al.

This paper presents a variational Bayesian kernel selection (VBKS) algorithm for sparse Gaussian process regression (SGPR) models. In contrast to existing GP kernel selection algorithms that aim to select only one kernel with the highest model evidence, our proposed VBKS algorithm considers the kernel as a random variable and learns its belief from data such that the uncertainty of the kernel can be interpreted and exploited to avoid overconfident GP predictions. To achieve this, we represent the probabilistic kernel as an additional variational variable in a variational inference (VI) framework for SGPR models where its posterior belief is learned together with that of the other variational variables (i.e., inducing variables and kernel hyperparameters). In particular, we transform the discrete kernel belief into a continuous parametric distribution via reparameterization in order to apply VI. Though it is computationally challenging to jointly optimize a large number of hyperparameters due to many kernels being evaluated simultaneously by our VBKS algorithm, we show that the variational lower bound of the log-marginal likelihood can be decomposed into an additive form such that each additive term depends only on a disjoint subset of the variational variables and can thus be optimized independently. Stochastic optimization is then used to maximize the variational lower bound by iteratively improving the variational approximation of the exact posterior belief via stochastic gradient ascent, which incurs constant time per iteration and hence scales to big data. We empirically evaluate the performance of our VBKS algorithm on synthetic and massive real-world datasets.

Tien Mai, Quoc Phong Nguyen, Kian Hsiang Low et al.

We consider the problem of recovering an expert's reward function with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) when there are missing/incomplete state-action pairs or observations in the demonstrated trajectories. This issue of missing trajectory data or information occurs in many situations, e.g., GPS signals from vehicles moving on a road network are intermittent. In this paper, we propose a tractable approach to directly compute the log-likelihood of demonstrated trajectories with incomplete/missing data. Our algorithm is efficient in handling a large number of missing segments in the demonstrated trajectories, as it performs the training with incomplete data by solving a sequence of systems of linear equations, and the number of such systems to be solved does not depend on the number of missing segments. Empirical evaluation on a real-world dataset shows that our training algorithm outperforms other conventional techniques.

Haibin Yu, Yizhou Chen, Zhongxiang Dai et al.

A multi-layer deep Gaussian process (DGP) model is a hierarchical composition of GP models with a greater expressive power. Exact DGP inference is intractable, which has motivated the recent development of deterministic and stochastic approximation methods. Unfortunately, the deterministic approximation methods yield a biased posterior belief while the stochastic one is computationally costly. This paper presents an implicit posterior variational inference (IPVI) framework for DGPs that can ideally recover an unbiased posterior belief and still preserve time efficiency. Inspired by generative adversarial networks, our IPVI framework achieves this by casting the DGP inference problem as a two-player game in which a Nash equilibrium, interestingly, coincides with an unbiased posterior belief. This consequently inspires us to devise a best-response dynamics algorithm to search for a Nash equilibrium (i.e., an unbiased posterior belief). Empirical evaluation shows that IPVI outperforms the state-of-the-art approximation methods for DGPs.

Yehong Zhang, Zhongxiang Dai, Kian Hsiang Low

This paper presents novel mixed-type Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithms to accelerate the optimization of a target objective function by exploiting correlated auxiliary information of binary type that can be more cheaply obtained, such as in policy search for reinforcement learning and hyperparameter tuning of machine learning models with early stopping. To achieve this, we first propose a mixed-type multi-output Gaussian process (MOGP) to jointly model the continuous target function and binary auxiliary functions. Then, we propose information-based acquisition functions such as mixed-type entropy search (MT-ES) and mixed-type predictive ES (MT-PES) for mixed-type BO based on the MOGP predictive belief of the target and auxiliary functions. The exact acquisition functions of MT-ES and MT-PES cannot be computed in closed form and need to be approximated. We derive an efficient approximation of MT-PES via a novel mixed-type random features approximation of the MOGP model whose cross-correlation structure between the target and auxiliary functions can be exploited for improving the belief of the global target maximizer using observations from evaluating these functions. We propose new practical constraints to relate the global target maximizer to the binary auxiliary functions. We empirically evaluate the performance of MT-ES and MT-PES with synthetic and real-world experiments.

Quoc Phong Nguyen, Kar Wai Lim, Dinil Mon Divakaran et al.

This paper looks into the problem of detecting network anomalies by analyzing NetFlow records. While many previous works have used statistical models and machine learning techniques in a supervised way, such solutions have the limitations that they require large amount of labeled data for training and are unlikely to detect zero-day attacks. Existing anomaly detection solutions also do not provide an easy way to explain or identify attacks in the anomalous traffic. To address these limitations, we develop and present GEE, a framework for detecting and explaining anomalies in network traffic. GEE comprises of two components: (i) Variational Autoencoder (VAE) - an unsupervised deep-learning technique for detecting anomalies, and (ii) a gradient-based fingerprinting technique for explaining anomalies. Evaluation of GEE on the recent UGR dataset demonstrates that our approach is effective in detecting different anomalies as well as identifying fingerprints that are good representations of these various attacks.

Jingfeng Zhang, Bo Han, Laura Wynter et al.

This paper presents a simple yet principled approach to boosting the robustness of the residual network (ResNet) that is motivated by the dynamical system perspective. Namely, a deep neural network can be interpreted using a partial differential equation, which naturally inspires us to characterize ResNet by an explicit Euler method. Our analytical studies reveal that the step factor h in the Euler method is able to control the robustness of ResNet in both its training and generalization. Specifically, we prove that a small step factor h can benefit the training robustness for back-propagation; from the view of forward-propagation, a small h can aid in the robustness of the model generalization. A comprehensive empirical evaluation on both vision CIFAR-10 and text AG-NEWS datasets confirms that a small h aids both the training and generalization robustness.

Trong Nghia Hoang, Quang Minh Hoang, Kian Hsiang Low et al.

Distributed machine learning (ML) is a modern computation paradigm that divides its workload into independent tasks that can be simultaneously achieved by multiple machines (i.e., agents) for better scalability. However, a typical distributed system is usually implemented with a central server that collects data statistics from multiple independent machines operating on different subsets of data to build a global analytic model. This centralized communication architecture however exposes a single choke point for operational failure and places severe bottlenecks on the server's communication and computation capacities as it has to process a growing volume of communication from a crowd of learning agents. To mitigate these bottlenecks, this paper introduces a novel Collective Online Learning Gaussian Process framework for massive distributed systems that allows each agent to build its local model, which can be exchanged and combined efficiently with others via peer-to-peer communication to converge on a global model of higher quality. Finally, our empirical results consistently demonstrate the efficiency of our framework on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Trong Nghia Hoang, Quang Minh Hoang, Ruofei Ouyang et al.

This paper presents a novel decentralized high-dimensional Bayesian optimization (DEC-HBO) algorithm that, in contrast to existing HBO algorithms, can exploit the interdependent effects of various input components on the output of the unknown objective function f for boosting the BO performance and still preserve scalability in the number of input dimensions without requiring prior knowledge or the existence of a low (effective) dimension of the input space. To realize this, we propose a sparse yet rich factor graph representation of f to be exploited for designing an acquisition function that can be similarly represented by a sparse factor graph and hence be efficiently optimized in a decentralized manner using distributed message passing. Despite richly characterizing the interdependent effects of the input components on the output of f with a factor graph, DEC-HBO can still guarantee no-regret performance asymptotically. Empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world experiments (e.g., sparse Gaussian process model with 1811 hyperparameters) shows that DEC-HBO outperforms the state-of-the-art HBO algorithms.

Ruofei Ouyang, Kian Hsiang Low

This paper presents novel Gaussian process decentralized data fusion algorithms exploiting the notion of agent-centric support sets for distributed cooperative perception of large-scale environmental phenomena. To overcome the limitations of scale in existing works, our proposed algorithms allow every mobile sensing agent to choose a different support set and dynamically switch to another during execution for encapsulating its own data into a local summary that, perhaps surprisingly, can still be assimilated with the other agents' local summaries (i.e., based on their current choices of support sets) into a globally consistent summary to be used for predicting the phenomenon. To achieve this, we propose a novel transfer learning mechanism for a team of agents capable of sharing and transferring information encapsulated in a summary based on a support set to that utilizing a different support set with some loss that can be theoretically bounded and analyzed. To alleviate the issue of information loss accumulating over multiple instances of transfer learning, we propose a new information sharing mechanism to be incorporated into our algorithms in order to achieve memory-efficient lazy transfer learning. Empirical evaluation on real-world datasets show that our algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

Haibin Yu, Trong Nghia Hoang, Kian Hsiang Low et al.

This paper presents a novel variational inference framework for deriving a family of Bayesian sparse Gaussian process regression (SGPR) models whose approximations are variationally optimal with respect to the full-rank GPR model enriched with various corresponding correlation structures of the observation noises. Our variational Bayesian SGPR (VBSGPR) models jointly treat both the distributions of the inducing variables and hyperparameters as variational parameters, which enables the decomposability of the variational lower bound that in turn can be exploited for stochastic optimization. Such a stochastic optimization involves iteratively following the stochastic gradient of the variational lower bound to improve its estimates of the optimal variational distributions of the inducing variables and hyperparameters (and hence the predictive distribution) of our VBSGPR models and is guaranteed to achieve asymptotic convergence to them. We show that the stochastic gradient is an unbiased estimator of the exact gradient and can be computed in constant time per iteration, hence achieving scalability to big data. We empirically evaluate the performance of our proposed framework on two real-world, massive datasets.

Quang Minh Hoang, Trong Nghia Hoang, Kian Hsiang Low

While much research effort has been dedicated to scaling up sparse Gaussian process (GP) models based on inducing variables for big data, little attention is afforded to the other less explored class of low-rank GP approximations that exploit the sparse spectral representation of a GP kernel. This paper presents such an effort to advance the state of the art of sparse spectrum GP models to achieve competitive predictive performance for massive datasets. Our generalized framework of stochastic variational Bayesian sparse spectrum GP (sVBSSGP) models addresses their shortcomings by adopting a Bayesian treatment of the spectral frequencies to avoid overfitting, modeling these frequencies jointly in its variational distribution to enable their interaction a posteriori, and exploiting local data for boosting the predictive performance. However, such structural improvements result in a variational lower bound that is intractable to be optimized. To resolve this, we exploit a variational parameterization trick to make it amenable to stochastic optimization. Interestingly, the resulting stochastic gradient has a linearly decomposable structure that can be exploited to refine our stochastic optimization method to incur constant time per iteration while preserving its property of being an unbiased estimator of the exact gradient of the variational lower bound. Empirical evaluation on real-world datasets shows that sVBSSGP outperforms state-of-the-art stochastic implementations of sparse GP models.

Chao Wang, Somchaya Liemhetcharat, Kian Hsiang Low

We introduce the concept of continuous transportation task to the context of multi-agent systems. A continuous transportation task is one in which a multi-agent team visits a number of fixed locations, picks up objects, and delivers them to a final destination. The goal is to maximize the rate of transportation while the objects are replenished over time. Examples of problems that need continuous transportation are foraging, area sweeping, and first/last mile problem. Previous approaches typically neglect the interference and are highly dependent on communications among agents. Some also incorporate an additional reconnaissance agent to gather information. In this paper, we present a hybrid of centralized and distributed approaches that minimize the interference and communications in the multi-agent team without the need for a reconnaissance agent. We contribute two partitioning-transportation algorithms inspired by existing algorithms, and contribute one novel online partitioning-transportation algorithm with information gathering in the multi-agent team. Our algorithms have been implemented and tested extensively in the simulation. The results presented in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms that outperform the existing algorithms, even without any communications between the agents and without the presence of a reconnaissance agent.

Yehong Zhang, Trong Nghia Hoang, Kian Hsiang Low et al.

This paper addresses the problem of active learning of a multi-output Gaussian process (MOGP) model representing multiple types of coexisting correlated environmental phenomena. In contrast to existing works, our active learning problem involves selecting not just the most informative sampling locations to be observed but also the types of measurements at each selected location for minimizing the predictive uncertainty (i.e., posterior joint entropy) of a target phenomenon of interest given a sampling budget. Unfortunately, such an entropy criterion scales poorly in the numbers of candidate sampling locations and selected observations when optimized. To resolve this issue, we first exploit a structure common to sparse MOGP models for deriving a novel active learning criterion. Then, we exploit a relaxed form of submodularity property of our new criterion for devising a polynomial-time approximation algorithm that guarantees a constant-factor approximation of that achieved by the optimal set of selected observations. Empirical evaluation on real-world datasets shows that our proposed approach outperforms existing algorithms for active learning of MOGP and single-output GP models.

Chun Kai Ling, Kian Hsiang Low, Patrick Jaillet

This paper presents a novel nonmyopic adaptive Gaussian process planning (GPP) framework endowed with a general class of Lipschitz continuous reward functions that can unify some active learning/sensing and Bayesian optimization criteria and offer practitioners some flexibility to specify their desired choices for defining new tasks/problems. In particular, it utilizes a principled Bayesian sequential decision problem framework for jointly and naturally optimizing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. In general, the resulting induced GPP policy cannot be derived exactly due to an uncountable set of candidate observations. A key contribution of our work here thus lies in exploiting the Lipschitz continuity of the reward functions to solve for a nonmyopic adaptive epsilon-optimal GPP (epsilon-GPP) policy. To plan in real time, we further propose an asymptotically optimal, branch-and-bound anytime variant of epsilon-GPP with performance guarantee. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our epsilon-GPP policy and its anytime variant in Bayesian optimization and an energy harvesting task.

Kian Hsiang Low, Jiangbo Yu, Jie Chen et al.

The expressive power of a Gaussian process (GP) model comes at a cost of poor scalability in the data size. To improve its scalability, this paper presents a low-rank-cum-Markov approximation (LMA) of the GP model that is novel in leveraging the dual computational advantages stemming from complementing a low-rank approximate representation of the full-rank GP based on a support set of inputs with a Markov approximation of the resulting residual process; the latter approximation is guaranteed to be closest in the Kullback-Leibler distance criterion subject to some constraint and is considerably more refined than that of existing sparse GP models utilizing low-rank representations due to its more relaxed conditional independence assumption (especially with larger data). As a result, our LMA method can trade off between the size of the support set and the order of the Markov property to (a) incur lower computational cost than such sparse GP models while achieving predictive performance comparable to them and (b) accurately represent features/patterns of any scale. Interestingly, varying the Markov order produces a spectrum of LMAs with PIC approximation and full-rank GP at the two extremes. An advantage of our LMA method is that it is amenable to parallelization on multiple machines/cores, thereby gaining greater scalability. Empirical evaluation on three real-world datasets in clusters of up to 32 computing nodes shows that our centralized and parallel LMA methods are significantly more time-efficient and scalable than state-of-the-art sparse and full-rank GP regression methods while achieving comparable predictive performances.

Jie Chen, Nannan Cao, Kian Hsiang Low et al.

Gaussian processes (GP) are Bayesian non-parametric models that are widely used for probabilistic regression. Unfortunately, it cannot scale well with large data nor perform real-time predictions due to its cubic time cost in the data size. This paper presents two parallel GP regression methods that exploit low-rank covariance matrix approximations for distributing the computational load among parallel machines to achieve time efficiency and scalability. We theoretically guarantee the predictive performances of our proposed parallel GPs to be equivalent to that of some centralized approximate GP regression methods: The computation of their centralized counterparts can be distributed among parallel machines, hence achieving greater time efficiency and scalability. We analytically compare the properties of our parallel GPs such as time, space, and communication complexity. Empirical evaluation on two real-world datasets in a cluster of 20 computing nodes shows that our parallel GPs are significantly more time-efficient and scalable than their centralized counterparts and exact/full GP while achieving predictive performances comparable to full GP.

Jie Chen, Kian Hsiang Low, Colin Keng-Yan Tan et al.

The problem of modeling and predicting spatiotemporal traffic phenomena over an urban road network is important to many traffic applications such as detecting and forecasting congestion hotspots. This paper presents a decentralized data fusion and active sensing (D2FAS) algorithm for mobile sensors to actively explore the road network to gather and assimilate the most informative data for predicting the traffic phenomenon. We analyze the time and communication complexity of D2FAS and demonstrate that it can scale well with a large number of observations and sensors. We provide a theoretical guarantee on its predictive performance to be equivalent to that of a sophisticated centralized sparse approximation for the Gaussian process (GP) model: The computation of such a sparse approximate GP model can thus be parallelized and distributed among the mobile sensors (in a Google-like MapReduce paradigm), thereby achieving efficient and scalable prediction. We also theoretically guarantee its active sensing performance that improves under various practical environmental conditions. Empirical evaluation on real-world urban road network data shows that our D2FAS algorithm is significantly more time-efficient and scalable than state-oftheart centralized algorithms while achieving comparable predictive performance.

Nuo Xu, Kian Hsiang Low, Jie Chen et al.

Central to robot exploration and mapping is the task of persistent localization in environmental fields characterized by spatially correlated measurements. This paper presents a Gaussian process localization (GP-Localize) algorithm that, in contrast to existing works, can exploit the spatially correlated field measurements taken during a robot's exploration (instead of relying on prior training data) for efficiently and scalably learning the GP observation model online through our proposed novel online sparse GP. As a result, GP-Localize is capable of achieving constant time and memory (i.e., independent of the size of the data) per filtering step, which demonstrates the practical feasibility of using GPs for persistent robot localization and autonomy. Empirical evaluation via simulated experiments with real-world datasets and a real robot experiment shows that GP-Localize outperforms existing GP localization algorithms.

Jie Chen, Kian Hsiang Low, Colin Keng-Yan Tan

Mobility-on-demand (MoD) systems have recently emerged as a promising paradigm of one-way vehicle sharing for sustainable personal urban mobility in densely populated cities. In this paper, we enhance the capability of a MoD system by deploying robotic shared vehicles that can autonomously cruise the streets to be hailed by users. A key challenge to managing the MoD system effectively is that of real-time, fine-grained mobility demand sensing and prediction. This paper presents a novel decentralized data fusion and active sensing algorithm for real-time, fine-grained mobility demand sensing and prediction with a fleet of autonomous robotic vehicles in a MoD system. Our Gaussian process (GP)-based decentralized data fusion algorithm can achieve a fine balance between predictive power and time efficiency. We theoretically guarantee its predictive performance to be equivalent to that of a sophisticated centralized sparse approximation for the GP model: The computation of such a sparse approximate GP model can thus be distributed among the MoD vehicles, hence achieving efficient and scalable demand prediction. Though our decentralized active sensing strategy is devised to gather the most informative demand data for demand prediction, it can achieve a dual effect of fleet rebalancing to service the mobility demands. Empirical evaluation on real-world mobility demand data shows that our proposed algorithm can achieve a better balance between predictive accuracy and time efficiency than state-of-the-art algorithms.

Kian Hsiang Low, John M. Dolan, Pradeep Khosla

Recent research in robot exploration and mapping has focused on sampling environmental hotspot fields. This exploration task is formalized by Low, Dolan, and Khosla (2008) in a sequential decision-theoretic planning under uncertainty framework called MASP. The time complexity of solving MASP approximately depends on the map resolution, which limits its use in large-scale, high-resolution exploration and mapping. To alleviate this computational difficulty, this paper presents an information-theoretic approach to MASP (iMASP) for efficient adaptive path planning; by reformulating the cost-minimizing iMASP as a reward-maximizing problem, its time complexity becomes independent of map resolution and is less sensitive to increasing robot team size as demonstrated both theoretically and empirically. Using the reward-maximizing dual, we derive a novel adaptive variant of maximum entropy sampling, thus improving the induced exploration policy performance. It also allows us to establish theoretical bounds quantifying the performance advantage of optimal adaptive over non-adaptive policies and the performance quality of approximately optimal vs. optimal adaptive policies. We show analytically and empirically the superior performance of iMASP-based policies for sampling the log-Gaussian process to that of policies for the widely-used Gaussian process in mapping the hotspot field. Lastly, we provide sufficient conditions that, when met, guarantee adaptivity has no benefit under an assumed environment model.

Jie Chen, Nannan Cao, Kian Hsiang Low et al.

Gaussian processes (GP) are Bayesian non-parametric models that are widely used for probabilistic regression. Unfortunately, it cannot scale well with large data nor perform real-time predictions due to its cubic time cost in the data size. This paper presents two parallel GP regression methods that exploit low-rank covariance matrix approximations for distributing the computational load among parallel machines to achieve time efficiency and scalability. We theoretically guarantee the predictive performances of our proposed parallel GPs to be equivalent to that of some centralized approximate GP regression methods: The computation of their centralized counterparts can be distributed among parallel machines, hence achieving greater time efficiency and scalability. We analytically compare the properties of our parallel GPs such as time, space, and communication complexity. Empirical evaluation on two real-world datasets in a cluster of 20 computing nodes shows that our parallel GPs are significantly more time-efficient and scalable than their centralized counterparts and exact/full GP while achieving predictive performances comparable to full GP.

Trong Nghia Hoang, Kian Hsiang Low

A key challenge in non-cooperative multi-agent systems is that of developing efficient planning algorithms for intelligent agents to interact and perform effectively among boundedly rational, self-interested agents (e.g., humans). The practicality of existing works addressing this challenge is being undermined due to either the restrictive assumptions of the other agents' behavior, the failure in accounting for their rationality, or the prohibitively expensive cost of modeling and predicting their intentions. To boost the practicality of research in this field, we investigate how intention prediction can be efficiently exploited and made practical in planning, thereby leading to efficient intention-aware planning frameworks capable of predicting the intentions of other agents and acting optimally with respect to their predicted intentions. We show that the performance losses incurred by the resulting planning policies are linearly bounded by the error of intention prediction. Empirical evaluations through a series of stochastic games demonstrate that our policies can achieve better and more robust performance than the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Trong Nghia Hoang, Kian Hsiang Low

Recent advances in Bayesian reinforcement learning (BRL) have shown that Bayes-optimality is theoretically achievable by modeling the environment's latent dynamics using Flat-Dirichlet-Multinomial (FDM) prior. In self-interested multi-agent environments, the transition dynamics are mainly controlled by the other agent's stochastic behavior for which FDM's independence and modeling assumptions do not hold. As a result, FDM does not allow the other agent's behavior to be generalized across different states nor specified using prior domain knowledge. To overcome these practical limitations of FDM, we propose a generalization of BRL to integrate the general class of parametric models and model priors, thus allowing practitioners' domain knowledge to be exploited to produce a fine-grained and compact representation of the other agent's behavior. Empirical evaluation shows that our approach outperforms existing multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms.

Nannan Cao, Kian Hsiang Low, John M. Dolan

A key problem of robotic environmental sensing and monitoring is that of active sensing: How can a team of robots plan the most informative observation paths to minimize the uncertainty in modeling and predicting an environmental phenomenon? This paper presents two principled approaches to efficient information-theoretic path planning based on entropy and mutual information criteria for in situ active sensing of an important broad class of widely-occurring environmental phenomena called anisotropic fields. Our proposed algorithms are novel in addressing a trade-off between active sensing performance and time efficiency. An important practical consequence is that our algorithms can exploit the spatial correlation structure of Gaussian process-based anisotropic fields to improve time efficiency while preserving near-optimal active sensing performance. We analyze the time complexity of our algorithms and prove analytically that they scale better than state-of-the-art algorithms with increasing planning horizon length. We provide theoretical guarantees on the active sensing performance of our algorithms for a class of exploration tasks called transect sampling, which, in particular, can be improved with longer planning time and/or lower spatial correlation along the transect. Empirical evaluation on real-world anisotropic field data shows that our algorithms can perform better or at least as well as the state-of-the-art algorithms while often incurring a few orders of magnitude less computational time, even when the field conditions are less favorable.

Prabhu Natarajan, Trong Nghia Hoang, Kian Hsiang Low et al.

A central problem of surveillance is to monitor multiple targets moving in a large-scale, obstacle-ridden environment with occlusions. This paper presents a novel principled Partially Observable Markov Decision Process-based approach to coordinating and controlling a network of active cameras for tracking and observing multiple mobile targets at high resolution in such surveillance environments. Our proposed approach is capable of (a) maintaining a belief over the targets' states (i.e., locations, directions, and velocities) to track them, even when they may not be observed directly by the cameras at all times, (b) coordinating the cameras' actions to simultaneously improve the belief over the targets' states and maximize the expected number of targets observed with a guaranteed resolution, and (c) exploiting the inherent structure of our surveillance problem to improve its scalability (i.e., linear time) in the number of targets to be observed. Quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art multi-camera coordination and control techniques show that our approach can achieve higher surveillance quality in real time. The practical feasibility of our approach is also demonstrated using real AXIS 214 PTZ cameras

Jie Chen, Kian Hsiang Low, Colin Keng-Yan Tan et al.

The problem of modeling and predicting spatiotemporal traffic phenomena over an urban road network is important to many traffic applications such as detecting and forecasting congestion hotspots. This paper presents a decentralized data fusion and active sensing (D2FAS) algorithm for mobile sensors to actively explore the road network to gather and assimilate the most informative data for predicting the traffic phenomenon. We analyze the time and communication complexity of D2FAS and demonstrate that it can scale well with a large number of observations and sensors. We provide a theoretical guarantee on its predictive performance to be equivalent to that of a sophisticated centralized sparse approximation for the Gaussian process (GP) model: The computation of such a sparse approximate GP model can thus be parallelized and distributed among the mobile sensors (in a Google-like MapReduce paradigm), thereby achieving efficient and scalable prediction. We also theoretically guarantee its active sensing performance that improves under various practical environmental conditions. Empirical evaluation on real-world urban road network data shows that our D2FAS algorithm is significantly more time-efficient and scalable than state-of-the-art centralized algorithms while achieving comparable predictive performance.