Learning to Teach
Teaching plays a very important role in our society, by spreading human knowledge and educating our next generations. A good teacher will select appropriate teaching materials, impact suitable methodologies, and set up targeted examinations, according to the learning behaviors of the students. In the field of artificial intelligence, however, one has not fully explored the role of teaching, and pays most attention to machine \emph{learning}. In this paper, we argue that equal attention, if not more, should be paid to teaching, and furthermore, an optimization framework (instead of heuristics) should be used to obtain good teaching strategies. We call this approach `learning to teach’. In the approach, two intelligent agents interact with each other: a student model (which corresponds to the learner in traditional machine learning algorithms), and a teacher model (which determines the appropriate data, loss function, and hypothesis space to facilitate the training of the student model). The teacher model leverages the feedback from the student model to optimize its own teaching strategies by means of reinforcement learning, so as to achieve teacher-student co-evolution. To demonstrate the practical value of our proposed approach, we take the training of deep neural networks (DNN) as an example, and show that by using the learning to teach techniques, we are able to use much less training data and fewer iterations to achieve almost the same accuracy for different kinds of DNN models (e.g., multi-layer perceptron, convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks) under various machine learning tasks (e.g., image classification and text understanding). …

VCExplorer
Graphs have been widely used to model different information networks, such as the Web, biological networks and social networks (e.g. Twitter). Due to the size and complexity of these graphs, how to explore and utilize these graphs has become a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose, VCExplorer, a new interactive graph exploration framework that integrates the strengths of graph visualization and graph summarization. Unlike existing graph visualization tools where vertices of a graph may be clustered into a smaller collection of super/virtual vertices, VCExplorer displays a small number of actual source graph vertices (called hubs) and summaries of the information between these vertices. We refer to such a graph as a HA-graph (Hub-based Aggregation Graph). This allows users to appreciate the relationship between the hubs, rather than super/virtual vertices. Users can navigate through the HA- graph by ‘drilling down’ into the summaries between hubs to display more hubs. We illustrate how the graph aggregation techniques can be integrated into the exploring framework as the consolidated information to users. In addition, we propose efficient graph aggregation algorithms over multiple subgraphs via computation sharing. Extensive experimental evaluations have been conducted using both real and synthetic datasets and the results indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of VCExplorer for exploration. …

Dirichlet Process Forest
Methods based on Bayesian decision tree ensembles have proven valuable in constructing high-quality predictions, and are particularly attractive in certain settings because they encourage low-order interaction effects. Despite adapting to the presence of low-order interactions for prediction purpose, we show that Bayesian decision tree ensembles are generally anti-conservative for the purpose of conducting interaction detection. We address this problem by introducing Dirichlet process forests (DP-Forests), which leverage the presence of low-order interactions by clustering the trees so that trees within the same cluster focus on detecting a specific interaction. We show on both simulated and benchmark data that DP-Forests perform well relative to existing interaction detection techniques for detecting low-order interactions, attaining very low false-positive and false-negative rates while maintaining the same performance for prediction using a comparable computational budget. …

Network Science
Network science is an interdisciplinary academic field which studies complex networks such as telecommunication networks, computer networks, biological networks, cognitive and semantic networks, and social networks. The field draws on theories and methods including graph theory from mathematics, statistical mechanics from physics, data mining and information visualization from computer science, inferential modeling from statistics, and social structure from sociology. The United States National Research Council defines network science as ‘the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena.’ …