Spatial-Spectral Manifold Reconstruction Preserving Embedding (SSMRPE)
The graph embedding (GE) methods have been widely applied for dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral imagery (HSI). However, a major challenge of GE is how to choose proper neighbors for graph construction and explore the spatial information of HSI data. In this paper, we proposed an unsupervised dimensionality reduction algorithm termed spatial-spectral manifold reconstruction preserving embedding (SSMRPE) for HSI classification. At first, a weighted mean filter (WMF) is employed to preprocess the image, which aims to reduce the influence of background noise. According to the spatial consistency property of HSI, the SSMRPE method utilizes a new spatial-spectral combined distance (SSCD) to fuse the spatial structure and spectral information for selecting effective spatial-spectral neighbors of HSI pixels. Then, it explores the spatial relationship between each point and its neighbors to adjusts the reconstruction weights for improving the efficiency of manifold reconstruction. As a result, the proposed method can extract the discriminant features and subsequently improve the classification performance of HSI. The experimental results on PaviaU and Salinas hyperspectral datasets indicate that SSMRPE can achieve better classification accuracies in comparison with some state-of-the-art methods. …

ANTIQUE
Considering the widespread use of mobile and voice search, answer passage retrieval for non-factoid questions plays a critical role in modern information retrieval systems. Despite the importance of the task, the community still feels the significant lack of large-scale non-factoid question answering collections with real questions and comprehensive relevance judgments. In this paper, we develop and release a collection of 2,626 open-domain non-factoid questions from a diverse set of categories. The dataset, called ANTIQUE, contains 34,011 manual relevance annotations. The questions were asked by real users in a community question answering service, i.e., Yahoo! Answers. Relevance judgments for all the answers to each question were collected through crowdsourcing. To facilitate further research, we also include a brief analysis of the data as well as baseline results on both classical and recently developed neural IR models. …

Deep Structured Generative Model
Deep generative models have shown promising results in generating realistic images, but it is still non-trivial to generate images with complicated structures. The main reason is that most of the current generative models fail to explore the structures in the images including spatial layout and semantic relations between objects. To address this issue, we propose a novel deep structured generative model which boosts generative adversarial networks (GANs) with the aid of structure information. In particular, the layout or structure of the scene is encoded by a stochastic and-or graph (sAOG), in which the terminal nodes represent single objects and edges represent relations between objects. With the sAOG appropriately harnessed, our model can successfully capture the intrinsic structure in the scenes and generate images of complicated scenes accordingly. Furthermore, a detection network is introduced to infer scene structures from a image. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on both modeling the intrinsic structures, and generating realistic images. …

Recurrent Control Net (RCN)
Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) are biological neural circuits capable of producing coordinated rhythmic outputs in the absence of rhythmic input. As a result, they are responsible for most rhythmic motion in living organisms. This rhythmic control is broadly applicable to fields such as locomotive robotics and medical devices. In this paper, we explore the possibility of creating a self-sustaining CPG network for reinforcement learning that learns rhythmic motion more efficiently and across more general environments than the current multilayer perceptron (MLP) baseline models. Recent work introduces the Structured Control Net (SCN), which maintains linear and nonlinear modules for local and global control, respectively. Here, we show that time-sequence architectures such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) model CPGs effectively. Combining previous work with RNNs and SCNs, we introduce the Recurrent Control Net (RCN), which adds a linear component to the, RCNs match and exceed the performance of baseline MLPs and SCNs across all environment tasks. Our findings confirm existing intuitions for RNNs on reinforcement learning tasks, and demonstrate promise of SCN-like structures in reinforcement learning. …