Emergent Communication for Rules Reasoning

Research on emergent communication between deep-learning-based agents has received extensive attention due to its inspiration for linguistics and artificial intelligence. However, previous attempts have hovered around emerging communication under perception-oriented environmental settings, that forces agents to describe low-level perceptual features intra image or symbol contexts. In this work, inspired by the classic human reasoning test (namely Raven's Progressive Matrix), we propose the Reasoning Game, a cognition-oriented environment that encourages agents to reason and communicate high-level rules, rather than perceived low-level contexts. Moreover, we propose 1) an unbiased dataset (namely rule-RAVEN) as a benchmark to avoid overfitting, 2) and a two-stage curriculum agent training method as a baseline for more stable convergence in the Reasoning Game, where contexts and semantics are bilaterally drifting. Experimental results show that, in the Reasoning Game, a semantically stable and compositional language emerges to solve reasoning problems. The emerged language helps agents apply the extracted rules to the generalization of unseen context attributes, and to the transfer between different context attributes or even tasks.

Angle-Based Cost-Sensitive Multicategory Classification

Many real-world classification problems come with costs which can vary for different types of misclassification. It is thus important to develop cost-sensitive classifiers which minimize the total misclassification cost. Although binary cost-sensitive classifiers have been well-studied, solving multicategory classification problems is still challenging. A popular approach to address this issue is to construct K classification functions for a K-class problem and remove the redundancy by imposing a sum-to-zero constraint. However, such method usually results in higher computational complexity and inefficient algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel angle-based cost-sensitive classification framework for multicategory classification without the sum-to-zero constraint. Loss functions that included in the angle-based cost-sensitive classification framework are further justified to be Fisher consistent. To show the usefulness of the framework, two cost-sensitive multicategory boosting algorithms are derived as concrete instances. Numerical experiments demonstrate that proposed boosting algorithms yield competitive classification performances against other existing boosting approaches.