CoDiM: Learning with Noisy Labels via Contrastive Semi-Supervised Learning

Labels are costly and sometimes unreliable. Noisy label learning, semi-supervised learning, and contrastive learning are three different strategies for designing learning processes requiring less annotation cost. Semi-supervised learning and contrastive learning have been recently demonstrated to improve learning strategies that address datasets with noisy labels. Still, the inner connections between these fields as well as the potential to combine their strengths together have only started to emerge. In this paper, we explore further ways and advantages to fuse them. Specifically, we propose CSSL, a unified Contrastive Semi-Supervised Learning algorithm, and CoDiM (Contrastive DivideMix), a novel algorithm for learning with noisy labels. CSSL leverages the power of classical semi-supervised learning and contrastive learning technologies and is further adapted to CoDiM, which learns robustly from multiple types and levels of label noise. We show that CoDiM brings consistent improvements and achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks.

Learning Perceptual Concepts by Bootstrapping from Human Queries

Robots need to be able to learn concepts from their users in order to adapt their capabilities to each user's unique task. But when the robot operates on high-dimensional inputs, like images or point clouds, this is impractical: the robot needs an unrealistic amount of human effort to learn the new concept. To address this challenge, we propose a new approach whereby the robot learns a low-dimensional variant of the concept and uses it to generate a larger data set for learning the concept in the high-dimensional space. This lets it take advantage of semantically meaningful privileged information only accessible at training time, like object poses and bounding boxes, that allows for richer human interaction to speed up learning. We evaluate our approach by learning prepositional concepts that describe object state or multi-object relationships, like above, near, or aligned, which are key to user specification of task goals and execution constraints for robots. Using a simulated human, we show that our approach improves sample complexity when compared to learning concepts directly in the high-dimensional space. We also demonstrate the utility of the learned concepts in motion planning tasks on a 7-DoF Franka Panda robot.

Learning Diverse Policies in MOBA Games via Macro-Goals

Recently, many researchers have made successful progress in building the AI systems for MOBA-game-playing with deep reinforcement learning, such as on Dota 2 and Honor of Kings. Even though these AI systems have achieved or even exceeded human-level performance, they still suffer from the lack of policy diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel Macro-Goals Guided framework, called MGG, to learn diverse policies in MOBA games. MGG abstracts strategies as macro-goals from human demonstrations and trains a Meta-Controller to predict these macro-goals. To enhance policy diversity, MGG samples macro-goals from the Meta-Controller prediction and guides the training process towards these goals. Experimental results on the typical MOBA game Honor of Kings demonstrate that MGG can execute diverse policies in different matches and lineups, and also outperform the state-of-the-art methods over 102 heroes.

Estimating Predictive Uncertainty Under Program Data Distribution Shift

Deep learning (DL) techniques have achieved great success in predictive accuracy in a variety of tasks, but deep neural networks (DNNs) are shown to produce highly overconfident scores for even abnormal samples. Well-defined uncertainty indicates whether a model's output should (or should not) be trusted and thus becomes critical in real-world scenarios which typically involves shifted input distributions due to many factors. Existing uncertainty approaches assume that testing samples from a different data distribution would induce unreliable model predictions thus have higher uncertainty scores. They quantify model uncertainty by calibrating DL model's confidence of a given input and evaluate the effectiveness in computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP)-related tasks. However, their methodologies' reliability may be compromised under programming tasks due to difference in data representations and shift patterns. In this paper, we first define three different types of distribution shift in program data and build a large-scale shifted Java dataset. We implement two common programming language tasks on our dataset to study the effect of each distribution shift on DL model performance. We also propose a large-scale benchmark of existing state-of-the-art predictive uncertainty on programming tasks and investigate their effectiveness under data distribution shift. Experiments show that program distribution shift does degrade the DL model performance to varying degrees and that existing uncertainty methods all present certain limitations in quantifying uncertainty on program dataset.

GLIB: Towards Automated Test Oracle for Graphically-Rich Applications

Graphically-rich applications such as games are ubiquitous with attractive visual effects of Graphical User Interface (GUI) that offers a bridge between software applications and end-users. However, various types of graphical glitches may arise from such GUI complexity and have become one of the main component of software compatibility issues. Our study on bug reports from game development teams in NetEase Inc. indicates that graphical glitches frequently occur during the GUI rendering and severely degrade the quality of graphically-rich applications such as video games. Existing automated testing techniques for such applications focus mainly on generating various GUI test sequences and check whether the test sequences can cause crashes. These techniques require constant human attention to captures non-crashing bugs such as bugs causing graphical glitches. In this paper, we present the first step in automating the test oracle for detecting non-crashing bugs in graphically-rich applications. Specifically, we propose \texttt{GLIB} based on a code-based data augmentation technique to detect game GUI glitches. We perform an evaluation of \texttt{GLIB} on 20 real-world game apps (with bug reports available) and the result shows that \texttt{GLIB} can achieve 100\% precision and 99.5\% recall in detecting non-crashing bugs such as game GUI glitches. Practical application of \texttt{GLIB} on another 14 real-world games (without bug reports) further demonstrates that \texttt{GLIB} can effectively uncover GUI glitches, with 48 of 53 bugs reported by \texttt{GLIB} having been confirmed and fixed so far.

Boosting Offline Reinforcement Learning with Residual Generative Modeling

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) tries to learn the near-optimal policy with recorded offline experience without online exploration. Current offline RL research includes: 1) generative modeling, i.e., approximating a policy using fixed data; and 2) learning the state-action value function. While most research focuses on the state-action function part through reducing the bootstrapping error in value function approximation induced by the distribution shift of training data, the effects of error propagation in generative modeling have been neglected. In this paper, we analyze the error in generative modeling. We propose AQL (action-conditioned Q-learning), a residual generative model to reduce policy approximation error for offline RL. We show that our method can learn more accurate policy approximations in different benchmark datasets. In addition, we show that the proposed offline RL method can learn more competitive AI agents in complex control tasks under the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game Honor of Kings.

SynthASR: Unlocking Synthetic Data for Speech Recognition

End-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have recently demonstrated superior performance over the traditional hybrid ASR models. Training an E2E ASR model requires a large amount of data which is not only expensive but may also raise dependency on production data. At the same time, synthetic speech generated by the state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) engines has advanced to near-human naturalness. In this work, we propose to utilize synthetic speech for ASR training (SynthASR) in applications where data is sparse or hard to get for ASR model training. In addition, we apply continual learning with a novel multi-stage training strategy to address catastrophic forgetting, achieved by a mix of weighted multi-style training, data augmentation, encoder freezing, and parameter regularization. In our experiments conducted on in-house datasets for a new application of recognizing medication names, training ASR RNN-T models with synthetic audio via the proposed multi-stage training improved the recognition performance on new application by more than 65% relative, without degradation on existing general applications. Our observations show that SynthASR holds great promise in training the state-of-the-art large-scale E2E ASR models for new applications while reducing the costs and dependency on production data.