STatistical AI Reading Group previous readings: June-August, 2002

June 13 (Stairmaster: Georgios):
Xavier Boyen and Daphne Koller, Tractable Inference for Complex Stochastic Processes, Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-98). longer version Postscript , on-line slides html

June 21 (Stairmaster: Leslie & Luke):
Adnan Darwiche and Matthew L. Ginsberg. A symbolic generalization of probability theory. In Proceedings of the Tenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pages 622-627, 1992. Postscript

June 27 (Special STAIR meeting: LOCATION: 8th floor playroom at 1:00 pm.)
Talk by Jeniffer Dy from Northeastern University: "Feature Selection for Unsupervised Learning Applied to Content-Based Image Retrieval". Abstract

July 2 (Stairmaster: Terran)
M. Kearns, Y. Mansour and A. Ng. A Sparse Sampling Algorithm for Near-Optimal Planning in Large Markov Decision Processes. Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Morgan Kaufmann, 1999, pages 1324--1331. To appear in a special issue of the journal Machine Learning Postscript

David A. McAllester and Satinder Singh. Approximate Planning for Factored POMDPs using Belief State Simplification. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-99) Postscript

July 11 (Stairmaster: Georgios):
D. Freitag and A. McCallum, Information extraction with HMM structures learned by stochastic optimization. Proceedings of AAAI-2000. Postscript

A. Stolcke & S. Omohundro (1992), Hidden Markov Model Induction by Bayesian Model Merging. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 5, S. J. Hanson, J. D. Cowan & C. L. Giles, editors, Morgan Kaufman, pp. 11-18. Postscript

(optional reading)
Matthew Brand, An entropic estimator for structure discovery, in Neural Information Processing Systems 11. PDF

July 18 (Stairmaster: Georgios):
Blai Bonet, An epsilon-Optimal Grid-Based Algorithm for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (ICML 2002) Postscript

July 25 (Stairmaster: Georgios):
G. Z. Grudic and L. H. Ungar. Exploiting Multiple Secondary Reinforcers in Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning, Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 01), August 4th - 10th, 2001, Seattle, Washington. Postscript

(background material)
Sutton, R.S., McAllester, D., Singh, S., Mansour, Y. (2000). Policy Gradient Methods for Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12 (Proceedings of the 1999 conference), pp. 1057-1063. MIT Press. Postscript

August 1st (Stairmaster: Georgios)
Policy invariance under reward transformations: Theory and application to reward shaping, Andrew Y. Ng, Daishi Harada and Stuart Russell. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Machine Learning, 1999. Postscript

August 8 (Stairmaster: Georgios):
J. Bagnell and J. Schneider, Autonomous Helicopter Control using Reinforcement Learning Policy Search Methods. Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2001, IEEE, May, 2001. Postscript

August 14 (Stairmaster: Luke):
D. Poole, ``Probabilistic Partial Evaluation: Exploiting rule structure in probabilistic inference'', Proc. Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-97), Nagoya, Japan, August 1997, pp. 1284-1291. html

D. Poole, ``Context-specific approximation in probabilistic inference'', Proc. Fourteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-98), Madison, Wisconsin, pages 447-454, July 1998. html

August 21 & 27 (Stairmaster: Michael):
Stuart Geman, Donald Geman - "Stochastic Relaxation, Gibbs Distributions, and the Bayesian Restoration of Images" IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, November 1984. (paper copy outside office NE43-781).