Even though data is abundant, it is often subjected to some form of censoring or truncation which inherently creates biases. Removing such biases and performing parameter estimation is a classical challenge in Statistics. In this paper, we focus on the problem of estimating the means of a mixture of two balanced d-dimensional Gaussians when the samples are prone to truncation. A recent theoretical study on the performance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for the aforementioned problem showed EM almost surely converges for d=1 and exhibits local convergence for d>1 to the true means. Nevertheless, the EM algorithm for the case of truncated mixture of two Gaussians is not easy to implement as it requires solving a set of nonlinear equations at every iteration which makes the algorithm impractical. In this work, we propose a gradient based variant of the EM algorithm that has global convergence guarantees when d=1 and local convergence for d>1 to the true means. Moreover, the update rule at every iteration is easy to compute which makes the proposed method practical. We also provide numerous experiments to obtain more insights into the effect of truncation on the convergence to the true parameters in high dimensions.

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is the task of extracting triplets of aspect terms, their associated sentiments, and the opinion terms that provide evidence for the expressed sentiments. Previous approaches to ASTE usually simultaneously extract all three components or first identify the aspect and opinion terms, then pair them up to predict their sentiment polarities. In this work, we present a novel paradigm, ASTE-RL, by regarding the aspect and opinion terms as arguments of the expressed sentiment in a hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) framework. We first focus on sentiments expressed in a sentence, then identify the target aspect and opinion terms for that sentiment. This takes into account the mutual interactions among the triplet's components while improving exploration and sample efficiency. Furthermore, this hierarchical RL setup enables us to deal with multiple and overlapping triplets. In our experiments, we evaluate our model on existing datasets from laptop and restaurant domains and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance. The implementation of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/ASTE-RL.

The problem of task planning for artificial agents remains largely unsolved. While there has been increasing interest in data-driven approaches for the study of task planning for artificial agents, a significant remaining bottleneck is the dearth of large-scale comprehensive task-based datasets. In this paper, we present ActioNet, an interactive end-to-end platform for data collection and augmentation of task-based dataset in 3D environment. Using ActioNet, we collected a large-scale comprehensive task-based dataset, comprising over 3000 hierarchical task structures and videos. Using the hierarchical task structures, the videos are further augmented across 50 different scenes to give over 150,000 video. To our knowledge, ActioNet is the first interactive end-to-end platform for such task-based dataset generation and the accompanying dataset is the largest task-based dataset of such comprehensive nature. The ActioNet platform and dataset will be made available to facilitate research in hierarchical task planning.11https://github.com/SamsonYuBaiJian/actionet