Shashank Shekhar

Randall Balestriero, Mark Ibrahim, Vlad Sobal et al. · meta-ai

Self-supervised learning, dubbed the dark matter of intelligence, is a promising path to advance machine learning. Yet, much like cooking, training SSL methods is a delicate art with a high barrier to entry. While many components are familiar, successfully training a SSL method involves a dizzying set of choices from the pretext tasks to training hyper-parameters. Our goal is to lower the barrier to entry into SSL research by laying the foundations and latest SSL recipes in the style of a cookbook. We hope to empower the curious researcher to navigate the terrain of methods, understand the role of the various knobs, and gain the know-how required to explore how delicious SSL can be.

Ben Sorscher, Robert Geirhos, Shashank Shekhar et al.

Widely observed neural scaling laws, in which error falls off as a power of the training set size, model size, or both, have driven substantial performance improvements in deep learning. However, these improvements through scaling alone require considerable costs in compute and energy. Here we focus on the scaling of error with dataset size and show how in theory we can break beyond power law scaling and potentially even reduce it to exponential scaling instead if we have access to a high-quality data pruning metric that ranks the order in which training examples should be discarded to achieve any pruned dataset size. We then test this improved scaling prediction with pruned dataset size empirically, and indeed observe better than power law scaling in practice on ResNets trained on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet. Next, given the importance of finding high-quality pruning metrics, we perform the first large-scale benchmarking study of ten different data pruning metrics on ImageNet. We find most existing high performing metrics scale poorly to ImageNet, while the best are computationally intensive and require labels for every image. We therefore developed a new simple, cheap and scalable self-supervised pruning metric that demonstrates comparable performance to the best supervised metrics. Overall, our work suggests that the discovery of good data-pruning metrics may provide a viable path forward to substantially improved neural scaling laws, thereby reducing the resource costs of modern deep learning.

Anthony Favier, Shashank Shekhar, Rachid Alami

We consider the human-aware task planning problem where a human-robot team is given a shared task with a known objective to achieve. Recent approaches tackle it by modeling it as a team of independent, rational agents, where the robot plans for both agents' (shared) tasks. However, the robot knows that humans cannot be administered like artificial agents, so it emulates and predicts the human's decisions, actions, and reactions. Based on earlier approaches, we describe a novel approach to solve such problems, which models and uses execution-time observability conventions. Abstractly, this modeling is based on situation assessment, which helps our approach capture the evolution of individual agents' beliefs and anticipate belief divergences that arise in practice. It decides if and when belief alignment is needed and achieves it with communication. These changes improve the solver's performance: (a) communication is effectively used, and (b) robust for more realistic and challenging problems.

Amirhossein Farzam, Shashank Shekhar, Isaac Mehlhaff et al.

The successful analysis of argumentative techniques from user-generated text is central to many downstream tasks such as political and market analysis. Recent argument mining tools use state-of-the-art deep learning methods to extract and annotate argumentative techniques from various online text corpora, however each task is treated as separate and different bespoke models are fine-tuned for each dataset. We show that different argument mining tasks share common semantic and logical structure by implementing a multi-task approach to argument mining that achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods for the same problems. Our model builds a shared representation of the input text that is common to all tasks and exploits similarities between tasks in order to further boost performance via parameter-sharing. Our results are important for argument mining as they show that different tasks share substantial similarities and suggest a holistic approach to the extraction of argumentative techniques from text.

Shashank Shekhar, Anthony Favier, Rachid Alami

We present a substantial extension of our Human-Aware Task Planning framework, tailored for scenarios with intermittent shared execution experiences and significant belief divergence between humans and robots, particularly due to the uncontrollable nature of humans. Our objective is to build a robot policy that accounts for uncontrollable human behaviors, thus enabling the anticipation of possible advancements achieved by the robot when the execution is not shared, e.g. when humans are briefly absent from the shared environment to complete a subtask. But, this anticipation is considered from the perspective of humans who have access to an estimated model for the robot. To this end, we propose a novel planning framework and build a solver based on AND-OR search, which integrates knowledge reasoning, including situation assessment by perspective taking. Our approach dynamically models and manages the expansion and contraction of potential advances while precisely keeping track of when (and when not) agents share the task execution experience. The planner systematically assesses the situation and ignores worlds that it has reason to think are impossible for humans. Overall, our new solver can estimate the distinct beliefs of the human and the robot along potential courses of action, enabling the synthesis of plans where the robot selects the right moment for communication, i.e. informing, or replying to an inquiry, or defers ontic actions until the execution experiences can be shared. Preliminary experiments in two domains, one novel and one adapted, demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.

Janpreet Singh, Shashank Shekhar

This paper summarizes the design, experiments and results of our solution to the Road Damage Detection and Classification Challenge held as part of the 2018 IEEE International Conference On Big Data Cup. Automatic detection and classification of damage in roads is an essential problem for multiple applications like maintenance and autonomous driving. We demonstrate that convolutional neural net based instance detection and classfication approaches can be used to solve this problem. In particular we show that Mask-RCNN, one of the state-of-the-art algorithms for object detection, localization and instance segmentation of natural images, can be used to perform this task in a fast manner with effective results. We achieve a mean F1 score of 0.528 at an IoU of 50% on the task of detection and classification of different types of damages in real-world road images acquired using a smartphone camera and our average inference time for each image is 0.105 seconds on an NVIDIA GeForce 1080Ti graphic card. The code and saved models for our approach can be found here : https://github.com/sshkhr/BigDataCup18 Submission

Shashank Shekhar, Adesh Bansode, Asif Salim

Most of the machine learning models have associated hyper-parameters along with their parameters. While the algorithm gives the solution for parameters, its utility for model performance is highly dependent on the choice of hyperparameters. For a robust performance of a model, it is necessary to find out the right hyper-parameter combination. Hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) is a systematic process that helps in finding the right values for them. The conventional methods for this purpose are grid search and random search and both methods create issues in industrial-scale applications. Hence a set of strategies have been recently proposed based on Bayesian optimization and evolutionary algorithm principles that help in runtime issues in a production environment and robust performance. In this paper, we compare the performance of four python libraries, namely Optuna, Hyper-opt, Optunity, and sequential model-based algorithm configuration (SMAC) that has been proposed for hyper-parameter optimization. The performance of these tools is tested using two benchmarks. The first one is to solve a combined algorithm selection and hyper-parameter optimization (CASH) problem The second one is the NeurIPS black-box optimization challenge in which a multilayer perception (MLP) architecture has to be chosen from a set of related architecture constraints and hyper-parameters. The benchmarking is done with six real-world datasets. From the experiments, we found that Optuna has better performance for CASH problem and HyperOpt for MLP problem.

Shashank Shekhar, Deepak Khemani

In recent years, the planning community has observed that techniques for learning heuristic functions have yielded improvements in performance. One approach is to use offline learning to learn predictive models from existing heuristics in a domain dependent manner. These learned models are deployed as new heuristic functions. The learned models can in turn be tuned online using a domain independent error correction approach to further enhance their informativeness. The online tuning approach is domain independent but instance specific, and contributes to improved performance for individual instances as planning proceeds. Consequently it is more effective in larger problems. In this paper, we mention two approaches applicable in Partial Order Causal Link (POCL) Planning that is also known as Plan Space Planning. First, we endeavor to enhance the performance of a POCL planner by giving an algorithm for supervised learning. Second, we then discuss an online error minimization approach in POCL framework to minimize the step-error associated with the offline learned models thus enhancing their informativeness. Our evaluation shows that the learning approaches scale up the performance of the planner over standard benchmarks, specially for larger problems.