Autonomous robotic agents are on their way to becoming in-home personal assistants, construction assistants, and warehouse workers. The degree of autonomy of such systems is reflected by the manner in which we specify goals to them; the abstraction of low-level commands to high-level goals goes hand-in-hand with increased autonomy. In...
Automated recognition of object categories in images is a critical step for many real-world computer vision applications. Interest region detectors and region descriptors have been widely employed to tackle the variability of objects in pose, scale, lighting, texture, color, and so on. Different types of object recognition problems usually require...
Top-performing approaches to embodied AI tasks like point-goal navigation often rely on training agents via reinforcement learning over tens of millions (or even billions) of experiential steps – learning neural agents that map directly from visual observations to actions. In this work, we question whether these extreme training durations are...
Machine learning systems are generally trained offline using ground truth data that has been labeled by experts. However, these batch training methods are not a good fit for many applications, especially in the cases where complete ground truth data is not available for offline training. In addition, batch methods do...
It is common practice in the unsupervised anomaly detection literature to create experimental benchmarks by sampling from existing supervised learning datasets. We seek to improve this practice by identifying four dimensions important to real-world anomaly detection applications --- point difficulty, clusteredness of anomalies, relevance of features, and relative frequency of...
Knowledge workers are struggling in the information flood. There is a growing interest in intelligent desktop environments that help knowledge workers organize their daily life. Intelligent desktop environments allow the desktop user to define a set of “activities” that characterize the user’s desktop work. These environments then attempt to identify...
The thesis focuses on model-based approximation methods for reinforcement
learning with large scale applications such as combinatorial optimization problems.
First, the thesis proposes two new model-based methods to stablize the
value–function approximation for reinforcement learning. The first one is the
BFBP algorithm, a batch-like reinforcement learning process which iterates between...
Remote sensing is the most practical way to acquire large amounts of land cover data for monitoring and understanding environmental change, so it is important to be able to map land cover from imagery. Maps defining land cover patches as polygons rather than pixels greatly improve processing efficiency in models...
Assessing AI systems is difficult. Humans rely on AI systems in increasing ways, both visible and invisible, meaning a variety of stakeholders need a variety of assessment tools (e.g., a professional auditor, a developer, and an end user all have different needs). We posit that it is possible to provide...