Variation of Information Distance (VI)
In probability theory and information theory, the variation of information or shared information distance is a measure of the distance between two clusterings (partitions of elements). It is closely related to mutual information; indeed, it is a simple linear expression involving the mutual information. Unlike the mutual information, however, the variation of information is a true metric, in that it obeys the triangle inequality. Even more, it is a universal metric, in that if any other distance measure two items close-by, then the variation of information will also judge them close. …

Hartley Spectral Pooling for Deep Learning
In most convolution neural networks (CNNs), downsampling hidden layers is adopted for increasing computation efficiency and the receptive field size. Such operation is commonly so-called pooling. Maximation and averaging over sliding windows (max/average pooling), and plain downsampling in the form of strided convolution are popular pooling methods. Since the pooling is a lossy procedure, a motivation of our work is to design a new pooling approach for less lossy in the dimensionality reduction. Inspired by the Fourier spectral pooling(FSP) proposed by Rippel et. al. [1], we present the Hartley transform based spectral pooling method in CNNs. Compared with FSP, the proposed spectral pooling avoids the use of complex arithmetic for frequency representation and reduces the computation. Spectral pooling preserves more structure features for network’s discriminability than max and average pooling. We empirically show that Hartley spectral pooling gives rise to the convergence of training CNNs on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. …

Adapting to Changing Environment (ACE)
Deep neural networks exhibit exceptional accuracy when they are trained and tested on the same data distributions. However, neural classifiers are often extremely brittle when confronted with domain shift—changes in the input distribution that occur over time. We present ACE, a framework for semantic segmentation that dynamically adapts to changing environments over the time. By aligning the distribution of labeled training data from the original source domain with the distribution of incoming data in a shifted domain, ACE synthesizes labeled training data for environments as it sees them. This stylized data is then used to update a segmentation model so that it performs well in new environments. To avoid forgetting knowledge from past environments, we introduce a memory that stores feature statistics from previously seen domains. These statistics can be used to replay images in any of the previously observed domains, thus preventing catastrophic forgetting. In addition to standard batch training using stochastic gradient decent (SGD), we also experiment with fast adaptation methods based on adaptive meta-learning. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets from SYNTHIA, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach when adapting to a number of tasks. …

Diffix
A longstanding open problem is that of how to get high quality statistics through direct queries to databases containing information about individuals without revealing information specific to those individuals. Diffix is a new framework for anonymous database query that adds noise based on the filter conditions in the query. A previous paper described Diffix for a simplified query semantics. This paper extends that description to include a wide variety of common features found in SQL. It describes attacks associated with various features, and the anonymization steps used to defend against those attacks. This paper describes the version of Diffix used for bounty program sponsored by Aircloak starting December 2017. …