# If you did not already know

Convolutional Highways
Convolutional highways are deep networks based on multiple stacked convolutional layers for feature preprocessing. …

Decentralized High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization (DEC-HBO)
This paper presents a novel decentralized high-dimensional Bayesian optimization (DEC-HBO) algorithm that, in contrast to existing HBO algorithms, can exploit the interdependent effects of various input components on the output of the unknown objective function f for boosting the BO performance and still preserve scalability in the number of input dimensions without requiring prior knowledge or the existence of a low (effective) dimension of the input space. To realize this, we propose a sparse yet rich factor graph representation of f to be exploited for designing an acquisition function that can be similarly represented by a sparse factor graph and hence be efficiently optimized in a decentralized manner using distributed message passing. Despite richly characterizing the interdependent effects of the input components on the output of f with a factor graph, DEC-HBO can still guarantee no-regret performance asymptotically. Empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world experiments (e.g., sparse Gaussian process model with 1811 hyperparameters) shows that DEC-HBO outperforms the state-of-the-art HBO algorithms. …

Computer-Assisted Fraud Detection
The automatic detection of frauds in banking transactions has been recently studied as a way to help the analysts finding fraudulent operations. Due to the availability of a human feedback, this task has been studied in the framework of active learning: the fraud predictor is allowed to sequentially call on an oracle. This human intervention is used to label new examples and improve the classification accuracy of the latter. Such a setting is not adapted in the case of fraud detection with financial data in European countries. Actually, as a human verification is mandatory to consider a fraud as really detected, it is not necessary to focus on improving the classifier. We introduce the setting of ‘Computer-assisted fraud detection’ where the goal is to minimize the number of non fraudulent operations submitted to an oracle. The existing methods are applied to this task and we show that a simple meta-algorithm provides competitive results in this scenario on benchmark datasets. …

Age Period Cohort Model (APC)
Age-Period-Cohort models is a class of models for demographic rates (mortality/morbidity/fertility/…) observed for a broad age range over a reasonably long time period, and classified by age and date of follow-up (period) and date of birth (cohort). This type of follow-up can be shown in a Lexis-diagram; a coordinate system with data of follow-up along the x-axis, and age along the y-axis. A single persons life-trajectory is therefore a straight line with slope 1 (as calender time and age advance at the same pace). Tabulated data enumerates the number of events and the risk time (sum of lengths of life-trajectories) in some subsets of the Lexis diagram, usually subsets classified by age and period in equally long intervals. Individual life-lines can be shown with colouring according to states, or the diagram can just be shown to indicate what ages and periods are covered, and what subsets are used for classification of events and risk time. The Age-Period-Cohort model describes the (log)rates as a sum of (non-linear) age- period- and cohort-effects. The three variables age (at follow-up), a, period (i.e. date of follow-up), p, and cohort (date of birth), c, are related by a=p-c – any one person’s age is calculated by subtracting the date of birth from the current date. Hence the three variables used to describe rates are linearly related, and the model can therefore be parametrized in different ways, and still produce the same estimated rates. In popular terms you can say that it is possible to move two linear effects around between the three terms, because the age-terms contains the linear effect of age, the period-terms contains the linear effect of period and the cohort effect contains the linear effect of cohort. An illustration of this phenomenon is in this little “film” of APC-effects on testis cancer rates in Denmark. All sets of estimates will yield the same set of fitted rates. …

# If you did not already know

Grid Computing
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed (thus not physically coupled) than cluster computers.[1] Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.[2] Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a ‘super virtual computer’ is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform large tasks. For certain applications, distributed or grid computing can be seen as a special type of parallel computing that relies on complete computers (with onboard CPUs, storage, power supplies, network interfaces, etc.) connected to a computer network (private or public) by a conventional network interface, such as Ethernet. This is in contrast to the traditional notion of a supercomputer, which has many processors connected by a local high-speed computer bus. …

Dual Lasso Selector
We consider the problem of model selection and estimation in sparse high dimensional linear regression models with strongly correlated variables. First, we study the theoretical properties of the dual Lasso solution, and we show that joint consideration of the Lasso primal and its dual solutions are useful for selecting correlated active variables. Second, we argue that correlations among active predictors are not problematic, and we derive a new weaker condition on the design matrix, called Pseudo Irrepresentable Condition (PIC). Third, we present a new variable selection procedure, Dual Lasso Selector, and we prove that the PIC is a necessary and sufficient condition for consistent variable selection for the proposed method. Finally, by combining the dual Lasso selector further with the Ridge estimation even better prediction performance is achieved. We call the combination (DLSelect+Ridge), it can be viewed as a new combined approach for inference in high-dimensional regression models with correlated variables. We illustrate DLSelect+Ridge method and compare it with popular existing methods in terms of variable selection, prediction accuracy, estimation accuracy and computation speed by considering various simulated and real data examples. …

Keras
Keras is a high-level neural networks library, written in Python and capable of running on top of either TensorFlow or Theano. It was developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation. Use Keras if you need a deep learning library that:
• Allows for easy and fast prototyping (through total modularity, minimalism, and extensibility).
• Supports both convolutional networks and recurrent networks, as well as combinations of the two.
• Supports arbitrary connectivity schemes (including multi-input and multi-output training).
• Runs seamlessly on CPU and GPU.
Deep Learning with Keras

Sample, Operation, Attribute, and Parameter Dimensions (SOAP)
The computational requirements for training deep neural networks (DNNs) have grown to the point that it is now standard practice to parallelize training. Existing deep learning systems commonly use data or model parallelism, but unfortunately, these strategies often result in suboptimal parallelization performance. In this paper, we define a more comprehensive search space of parallelization strategies for DNNs called SOAP, which includes strategies to parallelize a DNN in the Sample, Operation, Attribute, and Parameter dimensions. We also propose FlexFlow, a deep learning framework that uses guided randomized search of the SOAP space to find a fast parallelization strategy for a specific parallel machine. To accelerate this search, FlexFlow introduces a novel execution simulator that can accurately predict a parallelization strategy’s performance and is three orders of magnitude faster than prior approaches that have to execute each strategy. We evaluate FlexFlow with six real-world DNN benchmarks on two GPU clusters and show that FlexFlow can increase training throughput by up to 3.8x over state-of-the-art approaches, even when including its search time, and also improves scalability. …

# If you did not already know

Non-Homogeneous Markov Switching Autoregressive Models (MS-AR)
In this paper, non-homogeneous Markov-Switching Autoregressive (MS-AR) models are proposed to describe wind time series. In these models, several au- toregressive models are used to describe the time evolution of the wind speed and the switching between these different models is controlled by a hidden Markov chain which represents the weather types. We first block the data by month in order to remove seasonal components and propose a MS-AR model with non-homogeneous autoregressive models to describe daily components. Then we discuss extensions where the hidden Markov chain is also non-stationary to handle seasonal and inter-annual fluctuations. …

SAOKE
In this paper, we consider the problem of open information extraction (OIE) for extracting entity and relation level intermediate structures from sentences in open-domain. We focus on four types of valuable intermediate structures (Relation, Attribute, Description, and Concept), and propose a unified knowledge expression form, SAOKE, to express them. We publicly release a data set which contains more than forty thousand sentences and the corresponding facts in the SAOKE format labeled by crowd-sourcing. To our knowledge, this is the largest publicly available human labeled data set for open information extraction tasks. Using this labeled SAOKE data set, we train an end-to-end neural model using the sequenceto-sequence paradigm, called Logician, to transform sentences into facts. For each sentence, different to existing algorithms which generally focus on extracting each single fact without concerning other possible facts, Logician performs a global optimization over all possible involved facts, in which facts not only compete with each other to attract the attention of words, but also cooperate to share words. An experimental study on various types of open domain relation extraction tasks reveals the consistent superiority of Logician to other states-of-the-art algorithms. The experiments verify the reasonableness of SAOKE format, the valuableness of SAOKE data set, the effectiveness of the proposed Logician model, and the feasibility of the methodology to apply end-to-end learning paradigm on supervised data sets for the challenging tasks of open information extraction. …

Scheduled Auxiliary Control (SAC-X)
We propose Scheduled Auxiliary Control (SAC-X), a new learning paradigm in the context of Reinforcement Learning (RL). SAC-X enables learning of complex behaviors – from scratch – in the presence of multiple sparse reward signals. To this end, the agent is equipped with a set of general auxiliary tasks, that it attempts to learn simultaneously via off-policy RL. The key idea behind our method is that active (learned) scheduling and execution of auxiliary policies allows the agent to efficiently explore its environment – enabling it to excel at sparse reward RL. Our experiments in several challenging robotic manipulation settings demonstrate the power of our approach. …

AN2VEC
The creation of social ties is largely determined by the entangled effects of people’s similarities in terms of individual characters and friends. However, feature and structural characters of people usually appear to be correlated, making it difficult to determine which has greater responsibility in the formation of the emergent network structure. We propose \emph{AN2VEC}, a node embedding method which ultimately aims at disentangling the information shared by the structure of a network and the features of its nodes. Building on the recent developments of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), we develop a multitask GCN Variational Autoencoder where different dimensions of the generated embeddings can be dedicated to encoding feature information, network structure, and shared feature-network information. We explore the interaction between these disentangled characters by comparing the embedding reconstruction performance to a baseline case where no shared information is extracted. We use synthetic datasets with different levels of interdependency between feature and network characters and show (i) that shallow embeddings relying on shared information perform better than the corresponding reference with unshared information, (ii) that this performance gap increases with the correlation between network and feature structure, and (iii) that our embedding is able to capture joint information of structure and features. Our method can be relevant for the analysis and prediction of any featured network structure ranging from online social systems to network medicine. …

# If you did not already know

Pointer Network (Ptr-Net)
We introduce a new neural architecture to learn the conditional probability of an output sequence with elements that are discrete tokens corresponding to positions in an input sequence. Such problems cannot be trivially addressed by existent approaches such as sequence-to-sequence and Neural Turing Machines, because the number of target classes in each step of the output depends on the length of the input, which is variable. Problems such as sorting variable sized sequences, and various combinatorial optimization problems belong to this class. Our model solves the problem of variable size output dictionaries using a recently proposed mechanism of neural attention. It differs from the previous attention attempts in that, instead of using attention to blend hidden units of an encoder to a context vector at each decoder step, it uses attention as a pointer to select a member of the input sequence as the output. We call this architecture a Pointer Net (Ptr-Net). We show Ptr-Nets can be used to learn approximate solutions to three challenging geometric problems — finding planar convex hulls, computing Delaunay triangulations, and the planar Travelling Salesman Problem — using training examples alone. Ptr-Nets not only improve over sequence-to-sequence with input attention, but also allow us to generalize to variable size output dictionaries. We show that the learnt models generalize beyond the maximum lengths they were trained on. We hope our results on these tasks will encourage a broader exploration of neural learning for discrete problems. …

Sparse Ternary Compression (STC)
Federated Learning allows multiple parties to jointly train a deep learning model on their combined data, without any of the participants having to reveal their local data to a centralized server. This form of privacy-preserving collaborative learning however comes at the cost of a significant communication overhead during training. To address this problem, several compression methods have been proposed in the distributed training literature that can reduce the amount of required communication by up to three orders of magnitude. These existing methods however are only of limited utility in the Federated Learning setting, as they either only compress the upstream communication from the clients to the server (leaving the downstream communication uncompressed) or only perform well under idealized conditions such as iid distribution of the client data, which typically can not be found in Federated Learning. In this work, we propose Sparse Ternary Compression (STC), a new compression framework that is specifically designed to meet the requirements of the Federated Learning environment. Our experiments on four different learning tasks demonstrate that STC distinctively outperforms Federated Averaging in common Federated Learning scenarios where clients either a) hold non-iid data, b) use small batch sizes during training, or where c) the number of clients is large and the participation rate in every communication round is low. We furthermore show that even if the clients hold iid data and use medium sized batches for training, STC still behaves pareto-superior to Federated Averaging in the sense that it achieves fixed target accuracies on our benchmarks within both fewer training iterations and a smaller communication budget. …

Unsupervised Continual Learning (UCL)
We first pose the Unsupervised Continual Learning (UCL) problem: learning salient representations from a non-stationary stream of unlabeled data in which the number of object classes varies with time. Given limited labeled data just before inference, those representations can also be associated with specific object types to perform classification. To solve the UCL problem, we propose an architecture that involves a single module, called Self-Taught Associative Memory (STAM), which loosely models the function of a cortical column in the mammalian brain. Hierarchies of STAM modules learn based on a combination of Hebbian learning, online clustering, detection of novel patterns, forgetting outliers, and top-down predictions. We illustrate the operation of STAMs in the context of learning handwritten digits in a continual manner with only 3-12 labeled examples per class. STAMs suggest a promising direction to solve the UCL problem without catastrophic forgetting. …

Network Laplacian Spectral Descriptor (NetLSD)
Comparison among graphs is ubiquitous in graph analytics. However, it is a hard task in terms of the expressiveness of the employed similarity measure and the efficiency of its computation. Ideally, graph comparison should be invariant to the order of nodes and the sizes of compared graphs, adaptive to the scale of graph patterns, and scalable. Unfortunately, these properties have not been addressed together. Graph comparisons still rely on direct approaches, graph kernels, or representation-based methods, which are all inefficient and impractical for large graph collections. In this paper, we propose NetLSD (Network Laplacian Spectral Descriptor), a permutation- and size-invariant, scale-adaptive, and scalably computable graph representation method that allows for straightforward comparisons. NetLSD hears the shape of a graph by extracting a compact signature that inherits the formal properties of the Laplacian spectrum, specifically its heat or wave kernel. To our knowledge, NetLSD is the first expressive graph representation that allows for efficient comparisons of large graphs, our evaluation on a variety of real-world graphs demonstrates that it outperforms previous works in both expressiveness and efficiency. …

# If you did not already know

A framework is introduced for actively and adaptively solving a sequence of machine learning problems, which are changing in bounded manner from one time step to the next. An algorithm is developed that actively queries the labels of the most informative samples from an unlabeled data pool, and that adapts to the change by utilizing the information acquired in the previous steps. Our analysis shows that the proposed active learning algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent achieves a near-optimal excess risk performance for maximum likelihood estimation. Furthermore, an estimator of the change in the learning problems using the active learning samples is constructed, which provides an adaptive sample size selection rule that guarantees the excess risk is bounded for sufficiently large number of time steps. Experiments with synthetic and real data are presented to validate our algorithm and theoretical results. …

Multiple Team Formation Problem (MTFP)
Allocating of people in multiple projects is an important issue considering the efficiency of groups from the point of view of social interaction. In this paper, based on previous works, the Multiple Team Formation Problem (MTFP) based on sociometric techniques is formulated as an optimization problem taking into account the social interaction among team members. To solve the resulting optimization problem we propose a Genetic Algorithm due to the NP-hard nature of the problem. The social cohesion is an important issue that directly impacts the productivity of the work environment. So, maintaining an appropriate level of cohesion keeps a group together, which will bring positive impacts on the results of a project. The aim of the proposal is to ensure the best possible effectiveness from the point of view of social interaction. In this way, the presented algorithm serves as a decision-making tool for managers to build teams of people in multiple projects. In order to analyze the performance of the proposed method, computational experiments with benchmarks were performed and compared with the exhaustive method. The results are promising and show that the algorithm generally obtains near-optimal results within a short computational time. …

Maple
Maple combines the world’s most powerful math engine with an interface that makes it extremely easy to analyze, explore, visualize, and solve mathematical problems. …

Proximal Alternating Direction Network
Deep learning models have gained great success in many real-world applications. However, most existing networks are typically designed in heuristic manners, thus lack of rigorous mathematical principles and derivations. Several recent studies build deep structures by unrolling a particular optimization model that involves task information. Unfortunately, due to the dynamic nature of network parameters, their resultant deep propagation networks do \emph{not} possess the nice convergence property as the original optimization scheme does. This paper provides a novel proximal unrolling framework to establish deep models by integrating experimentally verified network architectures and rich cues of the tasks. More importantly, we \emph{prove in theory} that 1) the propagation generated by our unrolled deep model globally converges to a critical-point of a given variational energy, and 2) the proposed framework is still able to learn priors from training data to generate a convergent propagation even when task information is only partially available. Indeed, these theoretical results are the best we can ask for, unless stronger assumptions are enforced. Extensive experiments on various real-world applications verify the theoretical convergence and demonstrate the effectiveness of designed deep models. …

# If you did not already know

Reptile
This paper considers metalearning problems, where there is a distribution of tasks, and we would like to obtain an agent that performs well (i.e., learns quickly) when presented with a previously unseen task sampled from this distribution. We present a remarkably simple met-alearning algorithm called Reptile, which learns a parameter initialization that can be fine-tuned quickly on a new task. Reptile works by repeatedly sampling a task, training on it, and moving the initialization towards the trained weights on that task. Unlike MAML, which also learns an initialization, Reptile doesn’t require differentiating through the optimization process, making it more suitable for optimization problems where many update steps are required. We show that Reptile performs well on some well-established benchmarks for few-shot classification. We provide some theoretical analysis aimed at understanding why Reptile works. …

Spatial Transformer GAN
We address the problem of finding realistic geometric corrections to a foreground object such that it appears natural when composited into a background image. To achieve this, we propose a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture that utilizes Spatial Transformer Networks (STNs) as the generator, which we call Spatial Transformer GANs (ST-GANs). ST-GANs seek image realism by operating in the geometric warp parameter space. In particular, we exploit an iterative STN warping scheme and propose a sequential training strategy that achieves better results compared to naive training of a single generator. One of the key advantages of ST-GAN is its applicability to high-resolution images indirectly since the predicted warp parameters are transferable between reference frames. We demonstrate our approach in two applications: (1) visualizing how indoor furniture (e.g. from product images) might be perceived in a room, (2) hallucinating how accessories like glasses would look when matched with real portraits. …

GOGGLES
Generating large labeled training data is becoming the biggest bottleneck in building and deploying supervised machine learning models. Recently, data programming has been proposed in the data management community to reduce the human cost in training data generation. Data programming expects users to write a set of labeling functions, each of which is a weak supervision source that labels a subset of data points with better-than-random accuracy. However, the success of data programming heavily depends on the quality (in terms of both accuracy and coverage) of the labeling functions that users still need to design manually. We propose affinity coding, a new paradigm for fully automatic generation of training data. In affinity coding, the similarity between the unlabeled instances and prototypes that are derived from the same unlabeled instances serve as signals (or sources of weak supervision) for determining class membership. We term this implicit similarity as the affinity score. Consequently, we can have as many sources of weak supervision as the number of unlabeled data points, without any human input. We also propose a system called GOGGLES that is an implementation of affinity coding for labeling image datasets. GOGGLES features novel techniques for deriving affinity scores from image datasets based on ‘semantic prototypes’ extracted from convolutional neural nets, as well as an expectation-maximization approach for performing class label inference based on the computed affinity scores. Compared to the state-of-the-art data programming system Snorkel, GOGGLES exhibits 14.88% average improvement in terms of the quality of labels generated for the binary labeling task. The GOGGLES system is open-sourced at https://…/.

# If you did not already know

Marimekko Chart
The Marimekko name has been adopted within business and the management consultancy industry to refer to a bar chart where all the bars are of equal height, there are no spaces between the bars, and the bars are in turn each divided into segments of different width. The design of the ‘marimekko’ chart is said to resemble a Marimekko print. The chart’s design encodes two variables (such as percentage of sales and market share), but it is criticised for making the data hard to perceive and to compare visually. …

Symbolic Reinforcement Learning with Common Sense (SRL+CS)
Deep Reinforcement Learning (deep RL) has made several breakthroughs in recent years in applications ranging from complex control tasks in unmanned vehicles to game playing. Despite their success, deep RL still lacks several important capacities of human intelligence, such as transfer learning, abstraction and interpretability. Deep Symbolic Reinforcement Learning (DSRL) seeks to incorporate such capacities to deep Q-networks (DQN) by learning a relevant symbolic representation prior to using Q-learning. In this paper, we propose a novel extension of DSRL, which we call Symbolic Reinforcement Learning with Common Sense (SRL+CS), offering a better balance between generalization and specialization, inspired by principles of common sense when assigning rewards and aggregating Q-values. Experiments reported in this paper show that SRL+CS learns consistently faster than Q-learning and DSRL, achieving also a higher accuracy. In the hardest case, where agents were trained in a deterministic environment and tested in a random environment, SRL+CS achieves nearly 100% average accuracy compared to DSRL’s 70% and DQN’s 50% accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case of near perfect zero-shot transfer learning using Reinforcement Learning. …

Dragon King Theory
The cover of a collection of articles about Dragon Kings Dragon king (DK) is double metaphor for an event that is both extremely large in size or impact (a ‘king’) and born of unique origins (a ‘dragon’) relative to its peers (other events from the same system). DK events are generated by / correspond to mechanisms such as positive feedback, tipping points, bifurcations, and phase transitions, that tend to occur in nonlinear and complex systems, and serve to amplify DK events to extreme levels. By understanding and monitoring these dynamics, some predictability of such events may be obtained. The theory has been developed by Prof. Didier Sornette, who hypothesizes that many of the crises that we face are in fact DK rather than black swans – i.e., they may be predictable to some degree. Given the importance of crises to the long-term organization of a variety of systems, the DK theory urges that special attention be given to the study and monitoring of extremes, and that a dynamic view be taken. From a scientific viewpoint, such extremes are interesting because they may reveal underlying, often hidden, organizing principles. Practically speaking, one should ambitiously study extreme risks, but not forget that significant uncertainty will almost always be present, and should be rigorously considered in decisions regarding risk management and design. The theory of DK is related to concepts such as: black swan theory, outliers, complex systems, nonlinear dynamics, power laws, extreme value theory, prediction, extreme risks, risk management, etc. …

V2CNet
We propose V2CNet, a new deep learning framework to automatically translate the demonstration videos to commands that can be directly used in robotic applications. Our V2CNet has two branches and aims at understanding the demonstration video in a fine-grained manner. The first branch has the encoder-decoder architecture to encode the visual features and sequentially generate the output words as a command, while the second branch uses a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to learn the fine-grained actions. By jointly training both branches, the network is able to model the sequential information of the command, while effectively encodes the fine-grained actions. The experimental results on our new large-scale dataset show that V2CNet outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin, while its output can be applied in real robotic applications. The source code and trained models will be made available. …

# If you did not already know

Aleph
In this paper we propose Aleph, a leaderless, fully asynchronous, Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol for ordering messages exchanged among processes. It is based on a distributed construction of a partially ordered set and the algorithm for reaching a consensus on its extension to a total order. To achieve the consensus, the processes perform computations based only on a local copy of the data structure, however, they are bound to end with the same results. Our algorithm uses a dual-threshold coin-tossing scheme as a randomization strategy and establishes the agreement in an expected constant number of rounds. In addition, we introduce a fast way of validating messages that can occur prior to determining the total ordering. …

Sparse Transformer
Transformers are powerful sequence models, but require time and memory that grows quadratically with the sequence length. In this paper we introduce sparse factorizations of the attention matrix which reduce this to $O(n \sqrt{n})$. We also introduce a) a variation on architecture and initialization to train deeper networks, b) the recomputation of attention matrices to save memory, and c) fast attention kernels for training. We call networks with these changes Sparse Transformers, and show they can model sequences tens of thousands of timesteps long using hundreds of layers. We use the same architecture to model images, audio, and text from raw bytes, setting a new state of the art for density modeling of Enwik8, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet-64. We generate unconditional samples that demonstrate global coherence and great diversity, and show it is possible in principle to use self-attention to model sequences of length one million or more. …

Semantic Referee
Understanding why machine learning algorithms may fail is usually the task of the human expert that uses domain knowledge and contextual information to discover systematic shortcomings in either the data or the algorithm. In this paper, we propose a semantic referee, which is able to extract qualitative features of the errors emerging from deep machine learning frameworks and suggest corrections. The semantic referee relies on ontological reasoning about spatial knowledge in order to characterize errors in terms of their spatial relations with the environment. Using semantics, the reasoner interacts with the learning algorithm as a supervisor. In this paper, the proposed method of the interaction between a neural network classifier and a semantic referee shows how to improve the performance of semantic segmentation for satellite imagery data. …

Low-Rank Discriminative Least Squares Regression Model (LRDLSR)
Latest least squares regression (LSR) methods mainly try to learn slack regression targets to replace strict zero-one labels. However, the difference of intra-class targets can also be highlighted when enlarging the distance between different classes, and roughly persuing relaxed targets may lead to the problem of overfitting. To solve above problems, we propose a low-rank discriminative least squares regression model (LRDLSR) for multi-class image classification. Specifically, LRDLSR class-wisely imposes low-rank constraint on the intra-class regression targets to encourage its compactness and similarity. Moreover, LRDLSR introduces an additional regularization term on the learned targets to avoid the problem of overfitting. These two improvements are helpful to learn a more discriminative projection for regression and thus achieving better classification performance. Experimental results over a range of image databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LRDLSR method. …

# If you did not already know

Triangle Lasso
Recently, network lasso has drawn many attentions due to its remarkable performance on simultaneous clustering and optimization. However, it usually suffers from the imperfect data (noise, missing values etc), and yields sub-optimal solutions. The reason is that it finds the similar instances according to their features directly, which is usually impacted by the imperfect data, and thus returns sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose triangle lasso to avoid its disadvantage. Triangle lasso finds the similar instances according to their neighbours. If two instances have many common neighbours, they tend to become similar. Although some instances are profiled by the imperfect data, it is still able to find the similar counterparts. Furthermore, we develop an efficient algorithm based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to obtain a moderately accurate solution. In addition, we present a dual method to obtain the accurate solution with the low additional time consumption. We demonstrate through extensive numerical experiments that triangle lasso is robust to the imperfect data. It usually yields a better performance than the state-of-the-art method when performing data analysis tasks in practical scenarios. …

Dilated-Residual U-Net Deep Learning Network (DRUNET)
Given that the neural and connective tissues of the optic nerve head (ONH) exhibit complex morphological changes with the development and progression of glaucoma, their simultaneous isolation from optical coherence tomography (OCT) images may be of great interest for the clinical diagnosis and management of this pathology. A deep learning algorithm was designed and trained to digitally stain (i.e. highlight) 6 ONH tissue layers by capturing both the local (tissue texture) and contextual information (spatial arrangement of tissues). The overall dice coefficient (mean of all tissues) was $0.91 \pm 0.05$ when assessed against manual segmentations performed by an expert observer. We offer here a robust segmentation framework that could be extended for the automated parametric study of the ONH tissues. …

Fusion Discriminator
We propose the fusion discriminator, a single unified framework for incorporating conditional information into a generative adversarial network (GAN) for a variety of distinct structured prediction tasks, including image synthesis, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation. Much like commonly used convolutional neural network — conditional Markov random field (CNN-CRF) models, the proposed method is able to enforce higher-order consistency in the model, but without being limited to a very specific class of potentials. The method is conceptually simple and flexible, and our experimental results demonstrate improvement on several diverse structured prediction tasks. …

Conditional BEKK matrix-F
We propose a new Conditional BEKK matrix-F (CBF) model for the time-varying realized covariance (RCOV) matrices. This CBF model is capable of capturing heavy-tailed RCOV, which is an important stylized fact but could not be handled adequately by the Wishart-based models. To further mimic the long memory feature of the RCOV, a special CBF model with the conditional heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) structure is introduced. Moreover, we give a systematical study on the probabilistic properties and statistical inferences of the CBF model, including exploring its stationarity, establishing the asymptotics of its maximum likelihood estimator, and giving some new inner-product-based tests for its model checking. In order to handle a large dimensional RCOV matrix, we construct two reduced CBF models — the variance-target CBF model (for moderate but fixed dimensional RCOV matrix) and the factor CBF model (for high dimensional RCOV matrix). For both reduced models, the asymptotic theory of the estimated parameters is derived. The importance of our entire methodology is illustrated by simulation results and two real examples. …

# If you did not already know

Partially Observable Stacked Thompson Sampling (POSTS)
State-of-the-art approaches to partially observable planning like POMCP are based on stochastic tree search. While these approaches are computationally efficient, they may still construct search trees of considerable size, which could limit the performance due to restricted memory resources. In this paper, we propose Partially Observable Stacked Thompson Sampling (POSTS), a memory bounded approach to open-loop planning in large POMDPs, which optimizes a fixed size stack of Thompson Sampling bandits. We empirically evaluate POSTS in four large benchmark problems and compare its performance with different tree-based approaches. We show that POSTS achieves competitive performance compared to tree-based open-loop planning and offers a performance-memory tradeoff, making it suitable for partially observable planning with highly restricted computational and memory resources. …

ANTNet
Deep convolutional neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision. However, deep neural networks require large computing resources to achieve high performance. Although depthwise separable convolution can be an efficient module to approximate a standard convolution, it often leads to reduced representational power of networks. In this paper, under budget constraints such as computational cost (MAdds) and the parameter count, we propose a novel basic architectural block, ANTBlock. It boosts the representational power by modeling, in a high dimensional space, interdependency of channels between a depthwise convolution layer and a projection layer in the ANTBlocks. Our experiments show that ANTNet built by a sequence of ANTBlocks, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art low-cost mobile convolutional neural networks across multiple datasets. On CIFAR100, our model achieves 75.7% top-1 accuracy, which is 1.5% higher than MobileNetV2 with 8.3% fewer parameters and 19.6% less computational cost. On ImageNet, our model achieves 72.8% top-1 accuracy, which is 0.8% improvement, with 157.7ms (20% faster) on iPhone 5s over MobileNetV2. …

Grounded Recurrent Neural Network (GRNN)
In this work, we present the Grounded Recurrent Neural Network (GRNN), a recurrent neural network architecture for multi-label prediction which explicitly ties labels to specific dimensions of the recurrent hidden state (we call this process ‘grounding’). The approach is particularly well-suited for extracting large numbers of concepts from text. We apply the new model to address an important problem in healthcare of understanding what medical concepts are discussed in clinical text. Using a publicly available dataset derived from Intensive Care Units, we learn to label a patient’s diagnoses and procedures from their discharge summary. Our evaluation shows a clear advantage to using our proposed architecture over a variety of strong baselines. …

Probabilistic Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning