Neural Variational Hybrid Collaborative Filtering (VDMF)
Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most used methods for Recommender System. Because of the Bayesian nature and non-linearity, deep generative models, e.g. Variational Autoencoder (VAE), have been applied into CF task, and have achieved great performance. However, most VAE-based methods suffer from matrix sparsity and consider the prior of users’ latent factors to be the same, which leads to poor latent representations of users and items. Additionally, most existing methods model latent factors of users only and but not items, which makes them not be able to recommend items to a new user. To tackle these problems, we propose a Neural Variational Hybrid Collaborative Filtering, \VDMF{}. Specifically, we consider both the generative processes of users and items, and the prior of latent factors of users and items to be \emph{side ~information-specific}, which enables our model to alleviate matrix sparsity and learn better latent representations of users and items. For inference purpose, we derived a Stochastic Gradient Variational Bayes (SGVB) algorithm to analytically approximate the intractable distributions of latent factors of users and items. Experiments conducted on two large datasets have showed our methods significantly outperform the state-of-the-art CF methods, including the VAE-based methods. …

State- and Static Output-Feedback Generalized Guaranteed Cost Control
In this paper, we propose state- and static output-feedback generalized guaranteed cost control (GCC) approaches for discrete-time linear systems subject to norm-bounded structured parametric uncertainties. This method enables the convex synthesis for a more general class of systems, where uncertainties are uncorrelated block diagonal, and no feed-through uncertainty is multiplicative with control input ones. It also provides necessary and sufficient conditions for state-feedback and sufficient conditions for static output-feedback. We also present a comparative study of the proposed controllers, standard Linear Quadratic Regulator, and GCC found in the literature. …

DeepPos
The widespread mobile devices facilitated the emergence of many new applications and services. Among them are location-based services (LBS) that provide services based on user’s location. Several techniques have been presented to enable LBS even in indoor environments where Global Positioning System (GPS) has low localization accuracy. These methods use some environment measurements (like Channel State Information (CSI) or Received Signal Strength (RSS)) for user localization. In this paper, we will use CSI and a novel deep learning algorithm to design a robust and efficient system for indoor localization. More precisely, we use supervised autoencoder (SAE) to model the environment using the data collected during the training phase. Then, during the testing phase, we use the trained model and estimate the coordinates of the unknown point by checking different possible labels. Unlike the previous fingerprinting approaches, in this work, we do not store the {CSI/RSS} of fingerprints and instead we model the environment only with a single SAE. The performance of the proposed scheme is then evaluated in two indoor environments and compared with that of similar approaches. …

Episodic Memory Deep Q-Network (EMDQN)
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have made huge progress in recent years by leveraging the power of deep neural networks (DNN). Despite the success, deep RL algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, often requiring many rounds of interaction with the environments to obtain satisfactory performance. Recently, episodic memory based RL has attracted attention due to its ability to latch on good actions quickly. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective biologically inspired RL algorithm called Episodic Memory Deep Q-Networks (EMDQN), which leverages episodic memory to supervise an agent during training. Experiments show that our proposed method can lead to better sample efficiency and is more likely to find good policies. It only requires 1/5 of the interactions of DQN to achieve many state-of-the-art performances on Atari games, significantly outperforming regular DQN and other episodic memory based RL algorithms. …