Humans often learn how to perform tasks via imitation: they observe others perform a task, and then very quickly infer the appropriate actions to take based on their observations. While extending this paradigm to autonomous agents is a wellstudied problem in general, there are two particular aspects that have largely been overlooked: (1) that the learning is done from observation only (i.e., without explicit action information), and (2) that the learning is typically done very quickly. In this work, we propose a two-phase, autonomous imitation learning technique called behavioral cloning from observation (BCO), that aims to provide improved performance with respect to both of these aspects. First, we allow the agent to acquire experience in a self-supervised fashion. This experience is used to develop a model which is then utilized to learn a particular task by observing an expert perform that task without the knowledge of the specific actions taken. We experimentally compare BCO to imitation learning methods, including the state-of-the-art, generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) technique, and we show comparable task performance in several different simulation domains while exhibiting increased learning speed after expert trajectories become available.

Despite their attractiveness, popular perception is that techniques for nonparametric function approximation do not scale to streaming data due to an intractable growth in the amount of storage they require. To solve this problem in a memory-affordable way, we propose an online technique based on functional stochastic gradient descent in tandem with supervised sparsification based on greedy function subspace projections. The method, called parsimonious online learning with kernels (POLK), provides a controllable tradeoff between its solution accuracy and the amount of memory it requires. We derive conditions under which the generated function sequence converges almost surely to the optimal function, and we establish that the memory requirement remains finite. We evaluate POLK for kernel multi-class logistic regression and kernel hinge-loss classification on three canonical data sets: a synthetic Gaussian mixture model, the MNIST hand-written digits, and the Brodatz texture database. On all three tasks, we observe a favorable trade-off of objective function evaluation, classification performance, and complexity of the nonparametric regressor extracted the proposed method.

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We provide two novel adaptive-rate compressive sensing (CS) strategies for sparse, time-varying signals using side information. The first method uses extra cross-validation measurements, and the second one exploits extra low-resolution measurements. Unlike the majority of current CS techniques, we do not assume that we know an upper bound on the number of significant coefficients that comprises the images in the video sequence. Instead, we use the side information to predict the number of significant coefficients in the signal at the next time instant. We develop our techniques in the specific context of background subtraction using a spatially multiplexing CS camera such as the single-pixel camera. For each image in the video sequence, the proposed techniques specify a fixed number of CS measurements to acquire and adjust this quantity from image to image. We experimentally validate the proposed methods on real surveillance video sequences.