Adrian Wills

Jodie A. Cochrane, Adrian Wills, Sarah J. Johnson

Decision trees are commonly used predictive models due to their flexibility and interpretability. This paper is directed at quantifying the uncertainty of decision tree predictions by employing a Bayesian inference approach. This is challenging because these approaches need to explore both the tree structure space and the space of decision parameters associated with each tree structure. This has been handled by using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, where a Markov Chain is constructed to provide samples from the desired Bayesian estimate. Importantly, the structure and the decision parameters are tightly coupled; small changes in the tree structure can demand vastly different decision parameters to provide accurate predictions. A challenge for existing MCMC approaches is proposing joint changes in both the tree structure and the decision parameters that result in efficient sampling. This paper takes a different approach, where each distinct tree structure is associated with a unique set of decision parameters. The proposed approach, entitled DCC-Tree, is inspired by the work in Zhou et al. [23] for probabilistic programs and Cochrane et al. [4] for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) based sampling for decision trees. Results show that DCC-Tree performs comparably to other HMC-based methods and better than existing Bayesian tree methods while improving on consistency and reducing the per-proposal complexity.

Filip de Roos, Carl Jidling, Adrian Wills et al.

Machine learning practitioners invest significant manual and computational resources in finding suitable learning rates for optimization algorithms. We provide a probabilistic motivation, in terms of Gaussian inference, for popular stochastic first-order methods. As an important special case, it recovers the Polyak step with a general metric. The inference allows us to relate the learning rate to a dimensionless quantity that can be automatically adapted during training by a control algorithm. The resulting meta-algorithm is shown to adapt learning rates in a robust manner across a large range of initial values when applied to deep learning benchmark problems.

Jarrad Courts, Johannes Hendriks, Adrian Wills et al.

This paper considers the problem of computing Bayesian estimates of both states and model parameters for nonlinear state-space models. Generally, this problem does not have a tractable solution and approximations must be utilised. In this work, a variational approach is used to provide an assumed density which approximates the desired, intractable, distribution. The approach is deterministic and results in an optimisation problem of a standard form. Due to the parametrisation of the assumed density selected first- and second-order derivatives are readily available which allows for efficient solutions. The proposed method is compared against state-of-the-art Hamiltonian Monte Carlo in two numerical examples.

Jarrad Courts, Adrian Wills, Thomas Schön et al.

This paper considers parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models, which is an important but challenging problem. We address this challenge by employing a variational inference (VI) approach, which is a principled method that has deep connections to maximum likelihood estimation. This VI approach ultimately provides estimates of the model as solutions to an optimisation problem, which is deterministic, tractable and can be solved using standard optimisation tools. A specialisation of this approach for systems with additive Gaussian noise is also detailed. The proposed method is examined numerically on a range of simulated and real examples focusing on the robustness to parameter initialisation; additionally, favourable comparisons are performed against state-of-the-art alternatives.

Timothy Farnworth, Christopher Renton, Reuben Strydom et al.

Machine vision is an important sensing technology used in mobile robotic systems. Advancing the autonomy of such systems requires accurate characterisation of sensor uncertainty. Vision includes intrinsic uncertainty due to the camera sensor and extrinsic uncertainty due to environmental lighting and texture, which propagate through the image processing algorithms used to produce visual measurements. To faithfully characterise visual measurements, we must take into account these uncertainties. In this paper, we propose a new class of likelihood functions that characterises the uncertainty of the error distribution of two-frame optical flow that enables a heteroscedastic dependence on texture. We employ the proposed class to characterise the Farneback and Lucas Kanade optical flow algorithms and achieve close agreement with their respective empirical error distributions over a wide range of texture in a simulated environment. The utility of the proposed likelihood model is demonstrated in a visual odometry ego-motion study, which results in performance competitive with contemporary methods. The development of an empirically congruent likelihood model advances the requisite tool-set for vision-based Bayesian inference and enables sensor data fusion with GPS, LiDAR and IMU to advance robust autonomous navigation.

Jarrad Courts, Adrian Wills, Thomas B. Schön

In this paper, the problem of state estimation, in the context of both filtering and smoothing, for nonlinear state-space models is considered. Due to the nonlinear nature of the models, the state estimation problem is generally intractable as it involves integrals of general nonlinear functions and the filtered and smoothed state distributions lack closed-form solutions. As such, it is common to approximate the state estimation problem. In this paper, we develop an assumed Gaussian solution based on variational inference, which offers the key advantage of a flexible, but principled, mechanism for approximating the required distributions. Our main contribution lies in a new formulation of the state estimation problem as an optimisation problem, which can then be solved using standard optimisation routines that employ exact first- and second-order derivatives. The resulting state estimation approach involves a minimal number of assumptions and applies directly to nonlinear systems with both Gaussian and non-Gaussian probabilistic models. The performance of our approach is demonstrated on several examples; a challenging scalar system, a model of a simple robotic system, and a target tracking problem using a von Mises-Fisher distribution and outperforms alternative assumed Gaussian approaches to state estimation.

Johannes Hendriks, Carl Jidling, Adrian Wills et al.

We present a novel approach to modelling and learning vector fields from physical systems using neural networks that explicitly satisfy known linear operator constraints. To achieve this, the target function is modelled as a linear transformation of an underlying potential field, which is in turn modelled by a neural network. This transformation is chosen such that any prediction of the target function is guaranteed to satisfy the constraints. The approach is demonstrated on both simulated and real data examples.

Nicholas O'Dell, Christopher Renton, Adrian Wills

We present a new method of learning a continuous occupancy field for use in robot navigation. Occupancy grid maps, or variants of, are possibly the most widely used and accepted method of building a map of a robot's environment. Various methods have been developed to learn continuous occupancy maps and have successfully resolved many of the shortcomings of grid mapping, namely, priori discretisation and spatial correlation. However, most methods for producing a continuous occupancy field remain computationally expensive or heuristic in nature. Our method explores a generalisation of the so-called Ising model as a suitable candidate for modelling an occupancy field. We also present a unique kernel for use within our method that models range measurements. The method is quite attractive as it requires only a small number of hyperparameters to be trained, and is computationally efficient. The small number of hyperparameters can be quickly learned by maximising a pseudo likelihood. The technique is demonstrated on both a small simulated indoor environment with known ground truth as well as large indoor and outdoor areas, using two common real data sets.

Carl Jidling, Johannes Hendriks, Thomas B. Schön et al.

Deep kernel learning refers to a Gaussian process that incorporates neural networks to improve the modelling of complex functions. We present a method that makes this approach feasible for problems where the data consists of line integral measurements of the target function. The performance is illustrated on computed tomography reconstruction examples.

Adrian Wills, Thomas Schön

In this paper we present a novel quasi-Newton algorithm for use in stochastic optimisation. Quasi-Newton methods have had an enormous impact on deterministic optimisation problems because they afford rapid convergence and computationally attractive algorithms. In essence, this is achieved by learning the second-order (Hessian) information based on observing first-order gradients. We extend these ideas to the stochastic setting by employing a highly flexible model for the Hessian and infer its value based on observing noisy gradients. In addition, we propose a stochastic counterpart to standard line-search procedures and demonstrate the utility of this combination on maximum likelihood identification for general nonlinear state space models.

Adrian Wills, Carl Jidling, Thomas Schon

During recent years there has been an increased interest in stochastic adaptations of limited memory quasi-Newton methods, which compared to pure gradient-based routines can improve the convergence by incorporating second order information. In this work we propose a direct least-squares approach conceptually similar to the limited memory quasi-Newton methods, but that computes the search direction in a slightly different way. This is achieved in a fast and numerically robust manner by maintaining a Cholesky factor of low dimension. This is combined with a stochastic line search relying upon fulfilment of the Wolfe condition in a backtracking manner, where the step length is adaptively modified with respect to the optimisation progress. We support our new algorithm by providing several theoretical results guaranteeing its performance. The performance is demonstrated on real-world benchmark problems which shows improved results in comparison with already established methods.

Johan Dahlin, Adrian Wills, Brett Ninness

Pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings (pmMH) is a versatile algorithm for sampling from target distributions which are not easy to evaluate point-wise. However, pmMH requires good proposal distributions to sample efficiently from the target, which can be problematic to construct in practice. This is especially a problem for high-dimensional targets when the standard random-walk proposal is inefficient. We extend pmMH to allow for constructing the proposal based on information from multiple past iterations. As a consequence, quasi-Newton (qN) methods can be employed to form proposals which utilize gradient information to guide the Markov chain to areas of high probability and to construct approximations of the local curvature to scale step sizes. The proposed method is demonstrated on several problems which indicate that qN proposals can perform better than other common Hessian-based proposals.

Adrian Wills, Thomas Schön

We provide a numerically robust and fast method capable of exploiting the local geometry when solving large-scale stochastic optimisation problems. Our key innovation is an auxiliary variable construction coupled with an inverse Hessian approximation computed using a receding history of iterates and gradients. It is the Markov chain nature of the classic stochastic gradient algorithm that enables this development. The construction offers a mechanism for stochastic line search adapting the step length. We numerically evaluate and compare against current state-of-the-art with encouraging performance on real-world benchmark problems where the number of observations and unknowns is in the order of millions.

Carl Jidling, Niklas Wahlström, Adrian Wills et al.

We consider a modification of the covariance function in Gaussian processes to correctly account for known linear constraints. By modelling the target function as a transformation of an underlying function, the constraints are explicitly incorporated in the model such that they are guaranteed to be fulfilled by any sample drawn or prediction made. We also propose a constructive procedure for designing the transformation operator and illustrate the result on both simulated and real-data examples.

Manon Kok, Johan Dahlin, Thomas B. Schön et al.

Maximum likelihood (ML) estimation using Newton's method in nonlinear state space models (SSMs) is a challenging problem due to the analytical intractability of the log-likelihood and its gradient and Hessian. We estimate the gradient and Hessian using Fisher's identity in combination with a smoothing algorithm. We explore two approximations of the log-likelihood and of the solution of the smoothing problem. The first is a linearization approximation which is computationally cheap, but the accuracy typically varies between models. The second is a sampling approximation which is asymptotically valid for any SSM but is more computationally costly. We demonstrate our approach for ML parameter estimation on simulated data from two different SSMs with encouraging results.