HierarchicalMeta Learning (HML)
Meta learning is a promising solution to few-shot learning problems. However, existing meta learning methods are restricted to the scenarios where training and application tasks share the same out-put structure. To obtain a meta model applicable to the tasks with new structures, it is required to collect new training data and repeat the time-consuming meta training procedure. This makes them inefficient or even inapplicable in learning to solve heterogeneous few-shot learning tasks. We thus develop a novel and principled HierarchicalMeta Learning (HML) method. Different from existing methods that only focus on optimizing the adaptability of a meta model to similar tasks, HML also explicitly optimizes its generalizability across heterogeneous tasks. To this end, HML first factorizes a set of similar training tasks into heterogeneous ones and trains the meta model over them at two levels to maximize adaptation and generalization performance respectively. The resultant model can then directly generalize to new tasks. Extensive experiments on few-shot classification and regression problems clearly demonstrate the superiority of HML over fine-tuning and state-of-the-art meta learning approaches in terms of generalization across heterogeneous tasks. …

Hierarchical Multiscale LSTM
Hierarchical Multiscale LSTM (Chung et al., 2016a) is a state-of-the-art language model that learns interpretable structure from character-level input. …

Learned Group Signals
We study a model where a data collector obtains data from users through a payment mechanism, aiming to learn the underlying state from the elicited data. The private signal of each user represents her knowledge about the state; and through social interactions each user can also learn noisy versions of her social friends’ signals, which is called `learned group signals’. Thanks to social learning, users have richer information about the state beyond their private signals. Based on both her private signal and learned group signals, each user makes strategic decisions to report a privacy-preserved version of her data to the data collector. We develop a Bayesian game theoretic framework to study the impact of social learning on users’ data reporting strategies and devise the payment mechanism for the data collector accordingly. Our findings reveal that, in general, the desired data reporting strategy at the Bayesian-Nash equilibrium can be in the form of either a symmetric randomized response (SR) strategy or an informative non-disclosive (ND) strategy. Specifically, a generalized majority voting rule is applied by each user to her noisy group signals to determine which strategy to follow. Further, when a user plays the ND strategy, she reports privacy-preserving data completely based on her group signals, independent of her private signal, which indicates that her privacy cost is zero. We emphasize that the reported data when a user plays the ND strategy is still informative about the underlying state because it is based on her learned group signals. As a result, both the data collector and the users can benefit from social learning which drives down the privacy costs and helps to improve the state estimation at a given payment budget. We further derive bounds on the minimum total payment required to achieve a given level of state estimation accuracy. …

Hive Plot
The hive plot is a rational visualization method for drawing networks. Nodes are mapped to and positioned on radially distributed linear axes – this mapping is based on network structural properties. Edges are drawn as curved links. Simple and interpretable. The purpose of the hive plot is to establish a new baseline for visualization of large networks – a method that is both general and tunable and useful as a starting point in visually exploring network structure. …