Hash2Vec
In this paper we propose the application of feature hashing to create word embeddings for natural language processing. Feature hashing has been used successfully to create document vectors in related tasks like document classification. In this work we show that feature hashing can be applied to obtain word embeddings in linear time with the size of the data. The results show that this algorithm, that does not need training, is able to capture the semantic meaning of words. We compare the results against GloVe showing that they are similar. As far as we know this is the first application of feature hashing to the word embeddings problem and the results indicate this is a scalable technique with practical results for NLP applications. …

Global Distillation
Deep neural networks are known to suffer from catastrophic forgetting in class-incremental learning, where the performance on previous tasks drastically degrades when learning a new task. To alleviate this effect, we propose to leverage a continuous and large stream of unlabeled data in the wild. In particular, to leverage such transient external data effectively, we design a novel class-incremental learning scheme with (a) a new distillation loss, termed global distillation, (b) a learning strategy to avoid overfitting to the most recent task, and (c) a sampling strategy for the desired external data. Our experimental results on various datasets, including CIFAR and ImageNet, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods over prior methods, particularly when a stream of unlabeled data is accessible: we achieve up to 9.3% of relative performance improvement compared to the state-of-the-art method. …

High-Utility Sequential Pattern Mining (HUSPM)
High-utility sequential pattern mining is an emerging topic in the field of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. It consists of discovering subsequences having a high utility (importance) in sequences, referred to as high-utility sequential patterns (HUSPs). HUSPs can be applied to many real-life applications, such as market basket analysis, E-commerce recommendation, click-stream analysis and scenic route planning. For example, in economics and targeted marketing, understanding economic behavior of consumers is quite challenging, such as finding credible and reliable information on product profitability. Several algorithms have been proposed to address this problem by efficiently mining utility-based useful sequential patterns. Nevertheless, the performance of these algorithms can be unsatisfying in terms of runtime and memory usage due to the combinatorial explosion of the search space for low utility threshold and large databases. Hence, this paper proposes a more efficient algorithm for the task of high-utility sequential pattern mining, called HUSP-ULL. It utilizes a lexicographic sequence (LS)-tree and a utility-linked (UL)-list structure to fast discover HUSPs. Furthermore, two pruning strategies are introduced in HUSP-ULL to obtain tight upper-bounds on the utility of candidate sequences, and reduce the search space by pruning unpromising candidates early. Substantial experiments both on real-life and synthetic datasets show that the proposed algorithm can effectively and efficiently discover the complete set of HUSPs and outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms. …

Stochastic Rank-Regularization
Over-parametrization of deep neural networks has recently been shown to be key to their successful training. However, it also renders them prone to overfitting and makes them expensive to store and train. Tensor regression networks significantly reduce the number of effective parameters in deep neural networks while retaining accuracy and the ease of training. They replace the flattening and fully-connected layers with a tensor regression layer, where the regression weights are expressed through the factors of a low-rank tensor decomposition. In this paper, to further improve tensor regression networks, we propose a novel stochastic rank-regularization. It consists of a novel randomized tensor sketching method to approximate the weights of tensor regression layers. We theoretically and empirically establish the link between our proposed stochastic rank-regularization and the dropout on low-rank tensor regression. Extensive experimental results with both synthetic data and real world datasets (i.e., CIFAR-100 and the UK Biobank brain MRI dataset) support that the proposed approach i) improves performance in both classification and regression tasks, ii) decreases overfitting, iii) leads to more stable training and iv) improves robustness to adversarial attacks and random noise. …