Metalog Distribution
In economics, business, engineering, science and other fields, continuous uncertainties frequently arise that are not easily- or well-characterized by previously-named continuous probability distributions. Frequently, there is data available from measurements, assessments, derivations, simulations or other sources that characterize the range of an uncertainty. But the underlying process that generated this data is either unknown or fails to lend itself to convenient derivation of equations that appropriately characterize the probability density (PDF), cumulative (CDF) or quantile distribution functions. The metalog distributions are a family of continuous univariate probability distributions that directly address this need. They can be used in most any situation in which CDF data is known and a flexible, simple, and easy-to-use continuous probability distribution is needed to represent that data. Consider their uses and benefits. Also consider their applications over a wide range of fields and data sources. …

Long Short-Term Attention (LSTA)
Egocentric activity recognition is one of the most challenging tasks in video analysis. It requires a fine-grained discrimination of small objects and their manipulation. While some methods base on strong supervision and attention mechanisms, they are either annotation consuming or do not take spatio-temporal patterns into account. In this paper we propose LSTA as a mechanism to focus on features from spatial relevant parts while attention is being tracked smoothly across the video sequence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LSTA on egocentric activity recognition with an end-to-end trainable two-stream architecture, achieving state of the art performance on four standard benchmarks. …

Gaussian Process Posterior Sampling Reinforcement Learning (GPPSTD)
Efficient Reinforcement Learning usually takes advantage of demonstration or good exploration strategy. By applying posterior sampling in model-free RL under the hypothesis of GP, we propose Gaussian Process Posterior Sampling Reinforcement Learning(GPPSTD) algorithm in continuous state space, giving theoretical justifications and empirical results. We also provide theoretical and empirical results that various demonstration could lower expected uncertainty and benefit posterior sampling exploration. In this way, we combined the demonstration and exploration process together to achieve a more efficient reinforcement learning. …

SkinnerDB
SkinnerDB is designed from the ground up for reliable join ordering. It maintains no data statistics and uses no cost or cardinality models. Instead, it uses reinforcement learning to learn optimal join orders on the fly, during the execution of the current query. To that purpose, we divide the execution of a query into many small time slices. Different join orders are tried in different time slices. We merge result tuples generated according to different join orders until a complete result is obtained. By measuring execution progress per time slice, we identify promising join orders as execution proceeds. Along with SkinnerDB, we introduce a new quality criterion for query execution strategies. We compare expected execution cost against execution cost for an optimal join order. SkinnerDB features multiple execution strategies that are optimized for that criterion. Some of them can be executed on top of existing database systems. For maximal performance, we introduce a customized execution engine, facilitating fast join order switching via specialized multi-way join algorithms and tuple representations. We experimentally compare SkinnerDB’s performance against various baselines, including MonetDB, Postgres, and adaptive processing methods. We consider various benchmarks, including the join order benchmark and TPC-H variants with user-defined functions. Overall, the overheads of reliable join ordering are negligible compared to the performance impact of the occasional, catastrophic join order choice. …