Jie Cheng

RuiXi Qiao, Jie Cheng, Xingyuan Dai et al.

Skills have been introduced to offline reinforcement learning (RL) as temporal abstractions to tackle complex, long-horizon tasks, promoting consistent behavior and enabling meaningful exploration. While skills in offline RL are predominantly modeled within a continuous latent space, the potential of discrete skill spaces remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we propose a compact discrete skill space for offline RL tasks supported by state-of-the-art transformer-based encoder and diffusion-based decoder. Coupled with a high-level policy trained via offline RL techniques, our method establishes a hierarchical RL framework where the trained diffusion decoder plays a pivotal role. Empirical evaluations show that the proposed algorithm, Discrete Diffusion Skill (DDS), is a powerful offline RL method. DDS performs competitively on Locomotion and Kitchen tasks and excels on long-horizon tasks, achieving at least a 12 percent improvement on AntMaze-v2 benchmarks compared to existing offline RL approaches. Furthermore, DDS offers improved interpretability, training stability, and online exploration compared to previous skill-based methods.

Kai Zhu, Yang Cao, Wei Zhai et al.

Few-shot class-incremental learning is to recognize the new classes given few samples and not forget the old classes. It is a challenging task since representation optimization and prototype reorganization can only be achieved under little supervision. To address this problem, we propose a novel incremental prototype learning scheme. Our scheme consists of a random episode selection strategy that adapts the feature representation to various generated incremental episodes to enhance the corresponding extensibility, and a self-promoted prototype refinement mechanism which strengthens the expression ability of the new classes by explicitly considering the dependencies among different classes. Particularly, a dynamic relation projection module is proposed to calculate the relation matrix in a shared embedding space and leverage it as the factor for bootstrapping the update of prototypes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the above-par incremental performance, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 13%, 17% and 11%, respectively.

Jie Cheng, Tianxi Li, Elizaveta Levina et al.

While graphical models for continuous data (Gaussian graphical models) and discrete data (Ising models) have been extensively studied, there is little work on graphical models linking both continuous and discrete variables (mixed data), which are common in many scientific applications. We propose a novel graphical model for mixed data, which is simple enough to be suitable for high-dimensional data, yet flexible enough to represent all possible graph structures. We develop a computationally efficient regression-based algorithm for fitting the model by focusing on the conditional log-likelihood of each variable given the rest. The parameters have a natural group structure, and sparsity in the fitted graph is attained by incorporating a group lasso penalty, approximated by a weighted $\ell_1$ penalty for computational efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through an extensive simulation study and apply it to a music annotation data set (CAL500), obtaining a sparse and interpretable graphical model relating the continuous features of the audio signal to categorical variables such as genre, emotions, and usage associated with particular songs. While we focus on binary discrete variables, we also show that the proposed methodology can be easily extended to general discrete variables.

Jie Cheng, Elizaveta Levina, Pei Wang et al.

There has been a lot of work fitting Ising models to multivariate binary data in order to understand the conditional dependency relationships between the variables. However, additional covariates are frequently recorded together with the binary data, and may influence the dependence relationships. Motivated by such a dataset on genomic instability collected from tumor samples of several types, we propose a sparse covariate dependent Ising model to study both the conditional dependency within the binary data and its relationship with the additional covariates. This results in subject-specific Ising models, where the subject's covariates influence the strength of association between the genes. As in all exploratory data analysis, interpretability of results is important, and we use L1 penalties to induce sparsity in the fitted graphs and in the number of selected covariates. Two algorithms to fit the model are proposed and compared on a set of simulated data, and asymptotic results are established. The results on the tumor dataset and their biological significance are discussed in detail.