Models, code, and papers for "Xi Chen":

##### Bayesian surrogate learning in dynamic simulator-based regression problems

Jan 25, 2019
Xi Chen, Mike Hobson

The estimation of unknown values of parameters (or hidden variables, control variables) that characterise a physical system often relies on the comparison of measured data with synthetic data produced by some numerical simulator of the system as the parameter values are varied. This process often encounters two major difficulties: the generation of synthetic data for each considered set of parameter values can be computationally expensive if the system model is complicated; and the exploration of the parameter space can be inefficient and/or incomplete, a typical example being when the exploration becomes trapped in a local optimum of the objection function that characterises the mismatch between the measured and synthetic data. A method to address both these issues is presented, whereby: a surrogate model (or proxy), which emulates the computationally expensive system simulator, is constructed using deep recurrent networks (DRN); and a nested sampling (NS) algorithm is employed to perform efficient and robust exploration of the parameter space. The analysis is performed in a Bayesian context, in which the samples characterise the full joint posterior distribution of the parameters, from which parameter estimates and uncertainties are easily derived. The proposed approach is compared with conventional methods in some numerical examples, for which the results demonstrate that one can accelerate the parameter estimation process by at least an order of magnitude.

* Submitted
##### Parallelized Interactive Machine Learning on Autonomous Vehicles

Dec 23, 2018
Xi Chen, Caylin Hickey

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has achieved superior performance in complex sequential tasks by learning directly from image input. A deep neural network is used as a function approximator and requires no specific state information. However, one drawback of using only images as input is that this approach requires a prohibitively large amount of training time and data for the model to learn the state feature representation and approach reasonable performance. This is not feasible in real-world applications, especially when the data are expansive and training phase could introduce disasters that affect human safety. In this work, we use a human demonstration approach to speed up training for learning features and use the resulting pre-trained model to replace the neural network in the deep RL Deep Q-Network (DQN), followed by human interaction to further refine the model. We empirically evaluate our approach by using only a human demonstration model and modified DQN with human demonstration model included in the Microsoft AirSim car simulator. Our results show that (1) pre-training with human demonstration in a supervised learning approach is better and much faster at discovering features than DQN alone, (2) initializing the DQN with a pre-trained model provides a significant improvement in training time and performance even with limited human demonstration, and (3) providing the ability for humans to supply suggestions during DQN training can speed up the network's convergence on an optimal policy, as well as allow it to learn more complex policies that are harder to discover by random exploration.

* 6 pages, NAECON 2018 - IEEE National Aerospace and Electronics Conference
##### A Note on a Tight Lower Bound for MNL-Bandit Assortment Selection Models

Sep 28, 2018
Xi Chen, Yining Wang

In this short note we consider a dynamic assortment planning problem under the capacitated multinomial logit (MNL) bandit model. We prove a tight lower bound on the accumulated regret that matches existing regret upper bounds for all parameters (time horizon $T$, number of items $N$ and maximum assortment capacity $K$) up to logarithmic factors. Our results close an $O(\sqrt{K})$ gap between upper and lower regret bounds from existing works.

* Operations Research Letters 46(5):534-537, 2018
* Final version, 4 pages (double column)
##### Classifying and Visualizing Motion Capture Sequences using Deep Neural Networks

Sep 01, 2014
Kyunghyun Cho, Xi Chen

The gesture recognition using motion capture data and depth sensors has recently drawn more attention in vision recognition. Currently most systems only classify dataset with a couple of dozens different actions. Moreover, feature extraction from the data is often computational complex. In this paper, we propose a novel system to recognize the actions from skeleton data with simple, but effective, features using deep neural networks. Features are extracted for each frame based on the relative positions of joints (PO), temporal differences (TD), and normalized trajectories of motion (NT). Given these features a hybrid multi-layer perceptron is trained, which simultaneously classifies and reconstructs input data. We use deep autoencoder to visualize learnt features, and the experiments show that deep neural networks can capture more discriminative information than, for instance, principal component analysis can. We test our system on a public database with 65 classes and more than 2,000 motion sequences. We obtain an accuracy above 95% which is, to our knowledge, the state of the art result for such a large dataset.

* VISAPP 2014
##### Adaptive Discrete Smoothing for High-Dimensional and Nonlinear Panel Data

Jan 03, 2020
Xi Chen, Ye Luo, Martin Spindler

In this paper we develop a data-driven smoothing technique for high-dimensional and non-linear panel data models. We allow for individual specific (non-linear) functions and estimation with econometric or machine learning methods by using weighted observations from other individuals. The weights are determined by a data-driven way and depend on the similarity between the corresponding functions and are measured based on initial estimates. The key feature of such a procedure is that it clusters individuals based on the distance / similarity between them, estimated in a first stage. Our estimation method can be combined with various statistical estimation procedures, in particular modern machine learning methods which are in particular fruitful in the high-dimensional case and with complex, heterogeneous data. The approach can be interpreted as a \textquotedblleft soft-clustering\textquotedblright\ in comparison to traditional\textquotedblleft\ hard clustering\textquotedblright that assigns each individual to exactly one group. We conduct a simulation study which shows that the prediction can be greatly improved by using our estimator. Finally, we analyze a big data set from didichuxing.com, a leading company in transportation industry, to analyze and predict the gap between supply and demand based on a large set of covariates. Our estimator clearly performs much better in out-of-sample prediction compared to existing linear panel data estimators.

* 18 pages, 1 figure, 6 tables
##### Robust Dynamic Assortment Optimization in the Presence of Outlier Customers

Oct 09, 2019
Xi Chen, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Yining Wang

We consider the dynamic assortment optimization problem under the multinomial logit model (MNL) with unknown utility parameters. The main question investigated in this paper is model mis-specification under the $\varepsilon$-contamination model, which is a fundamental model in robust statistics and machine learning. In particular, throughout a selling horizon of length $T$, we assume that customers make purchases according to a well specified underlying multinomial logit choice model in a ($1-\varepsilon$)-fraction of the time periods, and make arbitrary purchasing decisions instead in the remaining $\varepsilon$-fraction of the time periods. In this model, we develop a new robust online assortment optimization policy via an active elimination strategy. We establish both upper and lower bounds on the regret, and show that our policy is optimal up to logarithmic factor in T when the assortment capacity is constant. Furthermore, we develop a fully adaptive policy that does not require any prior knowledge of the contamination parameter $\varepsilon$. Our simulation study shows that our policy outperforms the existing policies based on upper confidence bounds (UCB) and Thompson sampling.

* 27 pages, 1 figure
##### Bayesian automated posterior repartitioning for nested sampling

Aug 13, 2019
Xi Chen, Farhan Feroz, Michael Hobson

Priors in Bayesian analyses often encode informative domain knowledge that can be useful in making the inference process more efficient. Occasionally, however, priors may be unrepresentative of the parameter values for a given dataset, which can result in inefficient parameter space exploration, or even incorrect inferences, particularly for nested sampling (NS) algorithms. Simply broadening the prior in such cases may be inappropriate or impossible in some applications. Hence a previous solution of this problem, known as posterior repartitioning (PR), redefines the prior and likelihood while keeping their product fixed, so that the posterior inferences and evidence estimates remain unchanged, but the efficiency of the NS process is significantly increased. In its most practical form, PR raises the prior to some power $\beta$, which is introduced as an auxiliary variable that must be determined on a case-by-case basis, usually by lowering $\beta$ from unity according to some pre-defined annealing schedule' until the resulting inferences converge to a consistent solution. We present here an alternative Bayesian automated PR' method, in which $\beta$ is instead treated as a hyperparameter that is inferred from the data alongside the original parameters of the problem, and then marginalised over to obtain the final inference. We show through numerical examples that this approach provides a robust and efficient `hands-off' solution to addressing the issue of unrepresentative priors in Bayesian inference using NS. Moreover, we show that for problems with representative priors the method has a negligible computational overhead relative to standard nesting sampling, which suggests that it should be used in as a matter of course in all NS analyses.

##### A Data Driven Approach for Motion Planning of Autonomous Driving Under Complex Scenario

Apr 18, 2019
Chenyang Xi, Tianyu Shi, Jie Chen

To guarantee the safe and efficient motion planning of autonomous driving under dynamic traffic environment, the autonomous vehicle should be equipped with not only the optimal but also a long term efficient policy to deal with complex scenarios. The first challenge is that to acquire the optimal planning trajectory means to sacrifice the planning efficiency. The second challenge is that most search based planning method cannot find the desired trajectory in extreme scenario. In this paper, we propose a data driven approach for motion planning to solve the above challenges. We transform the lane change mission into Mixed Integer Quadratic Problem with logical constraints, allowing the planning module to provide feasible, safe and comfortable actions in more complex scenario. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical learning structure to guarantee online, fast and more generalized motion planning. Our approach's performance is demonstrated in the simulated lane change scenario and compared with related planning method.

* submitted to ITSC 2019
##### Boundary-Aware Network for Fast and High-Accuracy Portrait Segmentation

Jan 12, 2019
Xi Chen, Donglian Qi, Jianxin Shen

Compared with other semantic segmentation tasks, portrait segmentation requires both higher precision and faster inference speed. However, this problem has not been well studied in previous works. In this paper, we propose a lightweight network architecture, called Boundary-Aware Network (BANet) which selectively extracts detail information in boundary area to make high-quality segmentation output with real-time( >25FPS) speed. In addition, we design a new loss function called refine loss which supervises the network with image level gradient information. Our model is able to produce finer segmentation results which has richer details than annotations.

##### A Method to Facilitate Cancer Detection and Type Classification from Gene Expression Data using a Deep Autoencoder and Neural Network

Dec 20, 2018
Xi Chen, Jin Xie, Qingcong Yuan

With the increased affordability and availability of whole-genome sequencing, large-scale and high-throughput gene expression is widely used to characterize diseases, including cancers. However, establishing specificity in cancer diagnosis using gene expression data continues to pose challenges due to the high dimensionality and complexity of the data. Here we present models of deep learning (DL) and apply them to gene expression data for the diagnosis and categorization of cancer. In this study, we have developed two DL models using messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) datasets available from the Genomic Data Commons repository. Our models achieved 98% accuracy in cancer detection, with false negative and false positive rates below 1.7%. In our results, we demonstrated that 18 out of 32 cancer-typing classifications achieved more than 90% accuracy. Due to the limitation of a small sample size (less than 50 observations), certain cancers could not achieve a higher accuracy in typing classification, but still achieved high accuracy for the cancer detection task. To validate our models, we compared them with traditional statistical models. The main advantage of our models over traditional cancer detection is the ability to use data from various cancer types to automatically form features to enhance the detection and diagnosis of a specific cancer type.

* 6 pages
##### First-order Newton-type Estimator for Distributed Estimation and Inference

Nov 28, 2018
Xi Chen, Weidong Liu, Yichen Zhang

This paper studies distributed estimation and inference for a general statistical problem with a convex loss that could be non-differentiable. For the purpose of efficient computation, we restrict ourselves to stochastic first-order optimization, which enjoys low per-iteration complexity. To motivate the proposed method, we first investigate the theoretical properties of a straightforward Divide-and-Conquer Stochastic Gradient Descent (DC-SGD) approach. Our theory shows that there is a restriction on the number of machines and this restriction becomes more stringent when the dimension $p$ is large. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a new multi-round distributed estimation procedure that approximates the Newton step only using stochastic subgradient. The key component in our method is the proposal of a computationally efficient estimator of $\Sigma^{-1} w$, where $\Sigma$ is the population Hessian matrix and $w$ is any given vector. Instead of estimating $\Sigma$ (or $\Sigma^{-1}$) that usually requires the second-order differentiability of the loss, the proposed First-Order Newton-type Estimator (FONE) directly estimates the vector of interest $\Sigma^{-1} w$ as a whole and is applicable to non-differentiable losses. Our estimator also facilitates the inference for the empirical risk minimizer. It turns out that the key term in the limiting covariance has the form of $\Sigma^{-1} w$, which can be estimated by FONE.

* 56 pages
##### Dynamic Assortment Optimization with Changing Contextual Information

Oct 31, 2018
Xi Chen, Yining Wang, Yuan Zhou

In this paper, we study the dynamic assortment optimization problem under a finite selling season of length $T$. At each time period, the seller offers an arriving customer an assortment of substitutable products under a cardinality constraint, and the customer makes the purchase among offered products according to a discrete choice model. Most existing work associates each product with a real-valued fixed mean utility and assumes a multinomial logit choice (MNL) model. In many practical applications, feature/contexutal information of products is readily available. In this paper, we incorporate the feature information by assuming a linear relationship between the mean utility and the feature. In addition, we allow the feature information of products to change over time so that the underlying choice model can also be non-stationary. To solve the dynamic assortment optimization under this changing contextual MNL model, we need to simultaneously learn the underlying unknown coefficient and makes the decision on the assortment. To this end, we develop an upper confidence bound (UCB) based policy and establish the regret bound on the order of $\widetilde O(d\sqrt{T})$, where $d$ is the dimension of the feature and $\widetilde O$ suppresses logarithmic dependence. We further established the lower bound $\Omega(d\sqrt{T}/K)$ where $K$ is the cardinality constraint of an offered assortment, which is usually small. When $K$ is a constant, our policy is optimal up to logarithmic factors. In the exploitation phase of the UCB algorithm, we need to solve a combinatorial optimization for assortment optimization based on the learned information. We further develop an approximation algorithm and an efficient greedy heuristic. The effectiveness of the proposed policy is further demonstrated by our numerical studies.

* 37 pages, 4 figures
##### Quantile Regression Under Memory Constraint

Oct 18, 2018
Xi Chen, Weidong Liu, Yichen Zhang

This paper studies the inference problem in quantile regression (QR) for a large sample size $n$ but under a limited memory constraint, where the memory can only store a small batch of data of size $m$. A natural method is the na\"ive divide-and-conquer approach, which splits data into batches of size $m$, computes the local QR estimator for each batch, and then aggregates the estimators via averaging. However, this method only works when $n=o(m^2)$ and is computationally expensive. This paper proposes a computationally efficient method, which only requires an initial QR estimator on a small batch of data and then successively refines the estimator via multiple rounds of aggregations. Theoretically, as long as $n$ grows polynomially in $m$, we establish the asymptotic normality for the obtained estimator and show that our estimator with only a few rounds of aggregations achieves the same efficiency as the QR estimator computed on all the data. Moreover, our result allows the case that the dimensionality $p$ goes to infinity. The proposed method can also be applied to address the QR problem under distributed computing environment (e.g., in a large-scale sensor network) or for real-time streaming data.

##### Equivalence Between Policy Gradients and Soft Q-Learning

Oct 14, 2018
John Schulman, Xi Chen, Pieter Abbeel

Two of the leading approaches for model-free reinforcement learning are policy gradient methods and $Q$-learning methods. $Q$-learning methods can be effective and sample-efficient when they work, however, it is not well-understood why they work, since empirically, the $Q$-values they estimate are very inaccurate. A partial explanation may be that $Q$-learning methods are secretly implementing policy gradient updates: we show that there is a precise equivalence between $Q$-learning and policy gradient methods in the setting of entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, that "soft" (entropy-regularized) $Q$-learning is exactly equivalent to a policy gradient method. We also point out a connection between $Q$-learning methods and natural policy gradient methods. Experimentally, we explore the entropy-regularized versions of $Q$-learning and policy gradients, and we find them to perform as well as (or slightly better than) the standard variants on the Atari benchmark. We also show that the equivalence holds in practical settings by constructing a $Q$-learning method that closely matches the learning dynamics of A3C without using a target network or $\epsilon$-greedy exploration schedule.

##### Query Tracking for E-commerce Conversational Search: A Machine Comprehension Perspective

Oct 08, 2018
Yunlun Yang, Yu Gong, Xi Chen

With the development of dialog techniques, conversational search has attracted more and more attention as it enables users to interact with the search engine in a natural and efficient manner. However, comparing with the natural language understanding in traditional task-oriented dialog which focuses on slot filling and tracking, the query understanding in E-commerce conversational search is quite different and more challenging due to more diverse user expressions and complex intentions. In this work, we define the real-world problem of query tracking in E-commerce conversational search, in which the goal is to update the internal query after each round of interaction. We also propose a self attention based neural network to handle the task in a machine comprehension perspective. Further more we build a novel E-commerce query tracking dataset from an operational E-commerce Search Engine, and experimental results on this dataset suggest that our proposed model outperforms several baseline methods by a substantial gain for Exact Match accuracy and F1 score, showing the potential of machine comprehension like model for this task.

* CIKM 2018
##### Dynamic Assortment Selection under the Nested Logit Models

Jun 27, 2018
Xi Chen, Yining Wang, Yuan Zhou

We study a stylized dynamic assortment planning problem during a selling season of finite length $T$, by considering a nested multinomial logit model with $M$ nests and $N$ items per nest. Our policy simultaneously learns customers' choice behavior and makes dynamic decisions on assortments based on the current knowledge. It achieves the regret at the order of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{MNT}+MN^2)$, where $M$ is the number of nests and $N$ is the number of products in each nest. We further provide a lower bound result of $\Omega(\sqrt{MT})$, which shows the optimality of the upper bound when $T>M$ and $N$ is small. However, the $N^2$ term in the upper bound is not ideal for applications where $N$ is large as compared to $T$. To address this issue, we further generalize our first policy by introducing a discretization technique, which leads to a regret of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{M}T^{2/3}+MNT^{1/3})$ with a specific choice of discretization granularity. It improves the previous regret bound whenever $N>T^{1/3}$. We provide numerical results to demonstrate the empirical performance of both proposed policies.

* 31 pages
##### Near-Optimal Policies for Dynamic Multinomial Logit Assortment Selection Models

May 12, 2018
Yining Wang, Xi Chen, Yuan Zhou

In this paper we consider the dynamic assortment selection problem under an uncapacitated multinomial-logit (MNL) model. By carefully analyzing a revenue potential function, we show that a trisection based algorithm achieves an item-independent regret bound of $O(\sqrt{T\log\log T})$, which matches information theoretical lower bounds up to iterated logarithmic terms. Our proof technique draws tools from the unimodal/convex bandit literature as well as adaptive confidence parameters in minimax multi-armed bandit problems.

* 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 table
##### Non-stationary Stochastic Optimization under $L_{p,q}$-Variation Measures

May 11, 2018
Xi Chen, Yining Wang, Yu-Xiang Wang

We consider a non-stationary sequential stochastic optimization problem, in which the underlying cost functions change over time under a variation budget constraint. We propose an $L_{p,q}$-variation functional to quantify the change, which yields less variation for dynamic function sequences whose changes are constrained to short time periods or small subsets of input domain. Under the $L_{p,q}$-variation constraint, we derive both upper and matching lower regret bounds for smooth and strongly convex function sequences, which generalize previous results in Besbes et al. (2015). Furthermore, we provide an upper bound for general convex function sequences with noisy gradient feedback, which matches the optimal rate as $p\to\infty$. Our results reveal some surprising phenomena under this general variation functional, such as the curse of dimensionality of the function domain. The key technical novelties in our analysis include affinity lemmas that characterize the distance of the minimizers of two convex functions with bounded Lp difference, and a cubic spline based construction that attains matching lower bounds.

* 38 pages, 3 figures. Revised version
##### Tracking Multiple Moving Objects Using Unscented Kalman Filtering Techniques

Feb 05, 2018
Xi Chen, Xiao Wang, Jianhua Xuan

It is an important task to reliably detect and track multiple moving objects for video surveillance and monitoring. However, when occlusion occurs in nonlinear motion scenarios, many existing methods often fail to continuously track multiple moving objects of interest. In this paper we propose an effective approach for detection and tracking of multiple moving objects with occlusion. Moving targets are initially detected using a simple yet efficient block matching technique, providing rough location information for multiple object tracking. More accurate location information is then estimated for each moving object by a nonlinear tracking algorithm. Considering the ambiguity caused by the occlusion among multiple moving objects, we apply an unscented Kalman filtering (UKF) technique for reliable object detection and tracking. Different from conventional Kalman filtering (KF), which cannot achieve the optimal estimation in nonlinear tracking scenarios, UKF can be used to track both linear and nonlinear motions due to the unscented transform. Further, it estimates the velocity information for each object to assist to the object detection algorithm, effectively delineating multiple moving objects of occlusion. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can correctly detect and track multiple moving objects with nonlinear motion patterns and occlusions.

* 2012 International Conference on Engineering and Applied Science (ICEAS 2012)
##### A Nearly Instance Optimal Algorithm for Top-k Ranking under the Multinomial Logit Model

Jul 30, 2017
Xi Chen, Yuanzhi Li, Jieming Mao

We study the active learning problem of top-$k$ ranking from multi-wise comparisons under the popular multinomial logit model. Our goal is to identify the top-$k$ items with high probability by adaptively querying sets for comparisons and observing the noisy output of the most preferred item from each comparison. To achieve this goal, we design a new active ranking algorithm without using any information about the underlying items' preference scores. We also establish a matching lower bound on the sample complexity even when the set of preference scores is given to the algorithm. These two results together show that the proposed algorithm is nearly instance optimal (similar to instance optimal [FLN03], but up to polylog factors). Our work extends the existing literature on rank aggregation in three directions. First, instead of studying a static problem with fixed data, we investigate the top-$k$ ranking problem in an active learning setting. Second, we show our algorithm is nearly instance optimal, which is a much stronger theoretical guarantee. Finally, we extend the pairwise comparison to the multi-wise comparison, which has not been fully explored in ranking literature.