bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Online Learning from Data Streams with Varying Feature Spaces
Authors: Beyazit Ege , Alagurajah Jeevithan , Wu Xindong
Published: September 2019

We study the problem of online learning with varying feature spaces. The problem is challenging because, unlike traditional online learning problems, varying feature spaces can introduce new features or stop having some features without following a pattern. Other existing methods such as online streaming feature selection (Wu et al. 2013), online learning from trapezoidal data streams (Zhang et al. 2016), and learning with feature evolvable streams (Hou, Zhang, and Zhou 2017) are not capable to learn from arbitrarily varying feature spaces because they make assumptions about the feature space dynamics. In this paper, we propose a novel online learning algorithm OLVF to learn from data with arbitrarily varying feature spaces. The OLVF algorithm learns to classify the feature spaces and the instances from feature spaces simultaneously. To classify an instance, the algorithm dynamically projects the instance classifier and the training instance onto their shared feature subspace. The feature space classifier predicts the projection confidences for a given feature space. The instance classifier will be updated by following the empirical risk minimization principle and the strength of the constraints will be scaled by the projection confidences. Afterwards, a feature sparsity method is applied to reduce the model complexity. Experiments on 10 datasets with varying feature spaces have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed OLVF algorithm. Moreover, experiments with trapezoidal data streams on the same datasets have been conducted to show that OLVF performs better than the state-of-the-art learning algorithm (Zhang et al. 2016).
CNN-Cert: An Efficient Framework for Certifying Robustness of Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Boopathy Akhilan , Weng Tsui-Wei , Chen Pin-Yu , Liu Sijia , Daniel Luca
Published: September 2019

Verifying robustness of neural network classifiers has attracted great interests and attention due to the success of deep neural networks and their unexpected vulnerability to adversarial perturbations. Although finding minimum adversarial distortion of neural networks (with ReLU activations) has been shown to be an NP-complete problem, obtaining a non-trivial lower bound of minimum distortion as a provable robustness guarantee is possible. However, most previous works only focused on simple fully-connected layers (multilayer perceptrons) and were limited to ReLU activations. This motivates us to propose a general and efficient framework, CNN-Cert, that is capable of certifying robustness on general convolutional neural networks. Our framework is general – we can handle various architectures including convolutional layers, max-pooling layers, batch normalization layer, residual blocks, as well as general activation functions; our approach is efficient – by exploiting the special structure of convolutional layers, we achieve up to 17 and 11 times of speed-up compared to the state-of-the-art certification algorithms (e.g. Fast-Lin, CROWN) and 366 times of speed-up compared to the dual-LP approach while our algorithm obtains similar or even better verification bounds. In addition, CNN-Cert generalizes state-of-the-art algorithms e.g. Fast-Lin and CROWN. We demonstrate by extensive experiments that our method outperforms state-of-the-art lowerbound-based certification algorithms in terms of both bound quality and speed.
Deep Convolutional Sum-Product Networks
Authors: Butz Cory J. , Oliveira Jhonatan S. , Dos Santos André E. , Teixeira André L.
Published: September 2019

We give conditions under which convolutional neural networks (CNNs) define valid sum-product networks (SPNs). One subclass, called convolutional SPNs (CSPNs), can be implemented using tensors, but also can suffer from being too shallow. Fortunately, tensors can be augmented while maintaining valid SPNs. This yields a larger subclass of CNNs, which we call deep convolutional SPNs (DCSPNs), where the convolutional and sum-pooling layers form rich directed acyclic graph structures. One salient feature of DCSPNs is that they are a rigorous probabilistic model. As such, they can exploit multiple kinds of probabilistic reasoning, including marginal inference and most probable explanation (MPE) inference. This allows an alternative method for learning DCSPNs using vectorized differentiable MPE, which plays a similar role to the generator in generative adversarial networks (GANs). Image sampling is yet another application demonstrating the robustness of DCSPNs. Our preliminary results on image sampling are encouraging, since the DCSPN sampled images exhibit variability. Experiments on image completion show that DCSPNs significantly outperform competing methods by achieving several state-of-the-art mean squared error (MSE) scores in both left-completion and bottom-completion in benchmark datasets.
FRAME Revisited: An Interpretation View Based on Particle Evolution
Authors: Cai Xu , Wu Yang , Li Guanbin , Chen Ziliang , Lin Liang
Published: September 2019

FRAME (Filters, Random fields, And Maximum Entropy) is an energy-based descriptive model that synthesizes visual realism by capturing mutual patterns from structural input signals. The maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is applied by default, yet conventionally causes the unstable training energy that wrecks the generated structures, which remains unexplained. In this paper, we provide a new theoretical insight to analyze FRAME, from a perspective of particle physics ascribing the weird phenomenon to KL-vanishing issue. In order to stabilize the energy dissipation, we propose an alternative Wasserstein distance in discrete time based on the conclusion that the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) discrete flow approximates KL discrete flow when the time step size tends to 0. Besides, this metric can still maintain the model’s statistical consistency. Quantitative and qualitative experiments have been respectively conducted on several widely used datasets. The empirical studies have evidenced the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
Dynamic Learning of Sequential Choice Bandit Problem under Marketing Fatigue
Authors: Cao Junyu , Sun Wei
Published: September 2019

Motivated by the observation that overexposure to unwanted marketing activities leads to customer dissatisfaction, we consider a setting where a platform offers a sequence of messages to its users and is penalized when users abandon the platform due to marketing fatigue. We propose a novel sequential choice model to capture multiple interactions taking place between the platform and its user: Upon receiving a message, a user decides on one of the three actions: accept the message, skip and receive the next message, or abandon the platform. Based on user feedback, the platform dynamically learns users’ abandonment distribution and their valuations of messages to determine the length of the sequence and the order of the messages, while maximizing the cumulative payoff over a horizon of length T. We refer to this online learning task as the sequential choice bandit problem. For the offline combinatorial optimization problem, we show a polynomialtime algorithm. For the online problem, we propose an algorithm that balances exploration and exploitation, and characterize its regret bound. Lastly, we demonstrate how to extend the model with user contexts to incorporate personalization.
Towards Non-Saturating Recurrent Units for Modelling Long-Term Dependencies
Authors: Chandar Sarath , Sankar Chinnadhurai , Vorontsov Eugene , Kahou Samira Ebrahimi , Bengio Yoshua
Published: September 2019

Modelling long-term dependencies is a challenge for recurrent neural networks. This is primarily due to the fact that gradients vanish during training, as the sequence length increases. Gradients can be attenuated by transition operators and are attenuated or dropped by activation functions. Canonical architectures like LSTM alleviate this issue by skipping information through a memory mechanism. We propose a new recurrent architecture (Non-saturating Recurrent Unit; NRU) that relies on a memory mechanism but forgoes both saturating activation functions and saturating gates, in order to further alleviate vanishing gradients. In a series of synthetic and real world tasks, we demonstrate that the proposed model is the only model that performs among the top 2 models across all tasks with and without long-term dependencies, when compared against a range of other architectures.
Disjoint Label Space Transfer Learning with Common Factorised Space
Authors: Chang Xiaobin , Yang Yongxin , Xiang Tao , Hospedales Timothy M.
Published: September 2019

In this paper, a unified approach is presented to transfer learning that addresses several source and target domain labelspace and annotation assumptions with a single model. It is particularly effective in handling a challenging case, where source and target label-spaces are disjoint, and outperforms alternatives in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. The key ingredient is a common representation termed Common Factorised Space. It is shared between source and target domains, and trained with an unsupervised factorisation loss and a graph-based loss. With a wide range of experiments, we demonstrate the flexibility, relevance and efficacy of our method, both in the challenging cases with disjoint label spaces, and in the more conventional cases such as unsupervised domain adaptation, where the source and target domains share the same label-sets.
Joint Domain Alignment and Discriminative Feature Learning for Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation
Authors: Chen Chao , Chen Zhihong , Jiang Boyuan , Jin Xinyu
Published: September 2019

Recently, considerable effort has been devoted to deep domain adaptation in computer vision and machine learning communities. However, most of existing work only concentrates on learning shared feature representation by minimizing the distribution discrepancy across different domains. Due to the fact that all the domain alignment approaches can only reduce, but not remove the domain shift, target domain samples distributed near the edge of the clusters, or far from their corresponding class centers are easily to be misclassified by the hyperplane learned from the source domain. To alleviate this issue, we propose to joint domain alignment and discriminative feature learning, which could benefit both domain alignment and final classification. Specifically, an instance-based discriminative feature learning method and a center-based discriminative feature learning method are proposed, both of which guarantee the domain invariant features with better intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Extensive experiments show that learning the discriminative features in the shared feature space can significantly boost the performance of deep domain adaptation methods.
Two-Stage Label Embedding via Neural Factorization Machine for Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Chen Chen , Wang Haobo , Liu Weiwei , Zhao Xingyuan , Hu Tianlei , Chen Gang
Published: September 2019

Label embedding has been widely used as a method to exploit label dependency with dimension reduction in multilabel classification tasks. However, existing embedding methods intend to extract label correlations directly, and thus they might be easily trapped by complex label hierarchies. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel Two-Stage Label Embedding (TSLE) paradigm that involves Neural Factorization Machine (NFM) to jointly project features and labels into a latent space. In encoding phase, we introduce a Twin Encoding Network (TEN) that digs out pairwise feature and label interactions in the first stage and then efficiently learn higherorder correlations with deep neural networks (DNNs) in the second stage. After the codewords are obtained, a set of hidden layers is applied to recover the output labels in decoding phase. Moreover, we develop a novel learning model by leveraging a max margin encoding loss and a label-correlation aware decoding loss, and we adopt the mini-batch Adam to optimize our learning model. Lastly, we also provide a kernel insight to better understand our proposed TSLE. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms other state-ofthe-art approaches.
Large-Scale Interactive Recommendation with Tree-Structured Policy Gradient
Authors: Chen Haokun , Dai Xinyi , Cai Han , Zhang Weinan , Wang Xuejian , Tang Ruiming , Zhang Yuzhou , Yu Yong
Published: September 2019

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been introduced to interactive recommender systems (IRS) because of its nature of learning from dynamic interactions and planning for long-run performance. As IRS is always with thousands of items to recommend (i.e., thousands of actions), most existing RL-based methods, however, fail to handle such a large discrete action space problem and thus become inefficient. The existing work that tries to deal with the large discrete action space problem by utilizing the deep deterministic policy gradient framework suffers from the inconsistency between the continuous action representation (the output of the actor network) and the real discrete action. To avoid such inconsistency and achieve high efficiency and recommendation effectiveness, in this paper, we propose a Tree-structured Policy Gradient Recommendation (TPGR) framework, where a balanced hierarchical clustering tree is built over the items and picking an item is formulated as seeking a path from the root to a certain leaf of the tree. Extensive experiments on carefully-designed environments based on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model provides superior recommendation performance and significant efficiency improvement over state-of-the-art methods.
Distributionally Robust Semi-Supervised Learning for People-Centric Sensing
Authors: Chen Kaixuan , Yao Lina , Zhang Dalin , Chang Xiaojun , Long Guodong , Wang Sen
Published: September 2019

Semi-supervised learning is crucial for alleviating labelling burdens in people-centric sensing. However, humangenerated data inherently suffer from distribution shift in semi-supervised learning due to the diverse biological conditions and behavior patterns of humans. To address this problem, we propose a generic distributionally robust model for semi-supervised learning on distributionally shifted data. Considering both the discrepancy and the consistency between the labeled data and the unlabeled data, we learn the latent features that reduce person-specific discrepancy and preserve task-specific consistency. We evaluate our model in a variety of people-centric recognition tasks on real-world datasets, including intention recognition, activity recognition, muscular movement recognition and gesture recognition. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
EA-CG: An Approximate Second-Order Method for Training Fully-Connected Neural Networks
Authors: Chen Sheng-Wei , Chou Chun-Nan , Chang Edward Y.
Published: September 2019

For training fully-connected neural networks (FCNNs), we propose a practical approximate second-order method including: 1) an approximation of the Hessian matrix and 2) a conjugate gradient (CG) based method. Our proposed approximate Hessian matrix is memory-efficient and can be applied to any FCNNs where the activation and criterion functions are twice differentiable. We devise a CG-based method incorporating one-rank approximation to derive Newton directions for training FCNNs, which significantly reduces both space and time complexity. This CG-based method can be employed to solve any linear equation where the coefficient matrix is Kroneckerfactored, symmetric and positive definite. Empirical studies show the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed method.
Data-Adaptive Metric Learning with Scale Alignment
Authors: Chen Shuo , Gong Chen , Yang Jian , Tai Ying , Hui Le , Li Jun
Published: September 2019

The central problem for most existing metric learning methods is to find a suitable projection matrix on the differences of all pairs of data points. However, a single unified projection matrix can hardly characterize all data similarities accurately as the practical data are usually very complicated, and simply adopting one global projection matrix might ignore important local patterns hidden in the dataset. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel method dubbed “Data-Adaptive Metric Learning” (DAML), which constructs a data-adaptive projection matrix for each data pair by selectively combining a set of learned candidate matrices. As a result, every data pair can obtain a specific projection matrix, enabling the proposed DAML to flexibly fit the training data and produce discriminative projection results. The model of DAML is formulated as an optimization problem which jointly learns candidate projection matrices and their sparse combination for every data pair. Nevertheless, the over-fitting problem may occur due to the large amount of parameters to be learned. To tackle this issue, we adopt the Total Variation (TV) regularizer to align the scales of data embedding produced by all candidate projection matrices, and thus the generated metrics of these learned candidates are generally comparable. Furthermore, we extend the basic linear DAML model to the kernerlized version (denoted “KDAML”) to handle the non-linear cases, and the Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (ISTA) is employed to solve the optimization model. Intensive experimental results on various applications including retrieval, classification, and verification clearly demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm to other state-of-the-art metric learning methodologies.
A Layer Decomposition-Recomposition Framework for Neuron Pruning towards Accurate Lightweight Networks
Authors: Chen Weijie , Zhang Yuan , Xie Di , Pu Shiliang
Published: September 2019

Neuron pruning is an efficient method to compress the network into a slimmer one for reducing the computational cost and storage overhead. Most of state-of-the-art results are obtained in a layer-by-layer optimization mode. It discards the unimportant input neurons and uses the survived ones to reconstruct the output neurons approaching to the original ones in a layer-by-layer manner. However, an unnoticed problem arises that the information loss is accumulated as layer increases since the survived neurons still do not encode the entire information as before. A better alternative is to propagate the entire useful information to reconstruct the pruned layer instead of directly discarding the less important neurons. To this end, we propose a novel Layer DecompositionRecomposition Framework (LDRF) for neuron pruning, by which each layer’s output information is recovered in an embedding space and then propagated to reconstruct the following pruned layers with useful information preserved. We mainly conduct our experiments on ILSVRC-12 benchmark with VGG-16 and ResNet-50. What should be emphasized is that our results before end-to-end fine-tuning are significantly superior owing to the information-preserving property of our proposed framework. With end-to-end fine-tuning, we achieve state-of-the-art results of 5.13× and 3× speed-up with only 0.5% and 0.65% top-5 accuracy drop respectively, which outperform the existing neuron pruning methods.
Embedding Uncertain Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Chen Xuelu , Chen Muhao , Shi Weijia , Sun Yizhou , Zaniolo Carlo
Published: September 2019

Embedding models for deterministic Knowledge Graphs (KG) have been extensively studied, with the purpose of capturing latent semantic relations between entities and incorporating the structured knowledge they contain into machine learning. However, there are many KGs that model uncertain knowledge, which typically model the inherent uncertainty of relations facts with a confidence score, and embedding such uncertain knowledge represents an unresolved challenge. The capturing of uncertain knowledge will benefit many knowledge-driven applications such as question answering and semantic search by providing more natural characterization of the knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertain KG embedding model UKGE, which aims to preserve both structural and uncertainty information of relation facts in the embedding space. Unlike previous models that characterize relation facts with binary classification techniques, UKGE learns embeddings according to the confidence scores of uncertain relation facts. To further enhance the precision of UKGE, we also introduce probabilistic soft logic to infer confidence scores for unseen relation facts during training. We propose and evaluate two variants of UKGE based on different confidence score modeling strategies. Experiments are conducted on three real-world uncertain KGs via three tasks, i.e. confidence prediction, relation fact ranking, and relation fact classification. UKGE shows effectiveness in capturing uncertain knowledge by achieving promising results, and it consistently outperforms baselines on these tasks.
Tensor Decomposition for Multilayer Networks Clustering
Authors: Chen Zitai , Chen Chuan , Zheng Zibin , Zhu Yi
Published: September 2019

Clustering on multilayer networks has been shown to be a promising approach to enhance the accuracy. Various multilayer networks clustering algorithms assume all networks derive from a latent clustering structure, and jointly learn the compatible and complementary information from different networks to excavate one shared underlying structure. However, such an assumption is in conflict with many emerging real-life applications due to the existence of noisy/irrelevant networks. To address this issue, we propose Centroid-based Multilayer Network Clustering (CMNC), a novel approach which can divide irrelevant relationships into different network groups and uncover the cluster structure in each group simultaneously. The multilayer networks is represented within a unified tensor framework for simultaneously capturing multiple types of relationships between a set of entities. By imposing the rank-(Lr,Lr,1) block term decomposition with nonnegativity, we are able to have well interpretations on the multiple clustering results based on graph cut theory. Numerically, we transform this tensor decomposition problem to an unconstrained optimization, thus can solve it efficiently under the nonlinear least squares (NLS) framework. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show the effectiveness and robustness of our method against noise and irrelevant data.
Image Block Augmentation for One-Shot Learning
Authors: Chen Zitian , Fu Yanwei , Chen Kaiyu , Jiang Yu-Gang
Published: September 2019

Given one or a few training instances of novel classes, oneshot learning task requires that the classifier generalizes to these novel classes. Directly training one-shot classifier may suffer from insufficient training instances in one-shot learning. Previous one-shot learning works investigate the metalearning or metric-based algorithms; in contrast, this paper proposes a Self-Training Jigsaw Augmentation (Self-Jig) method for one-shot learning. Particularly, we solve one-shot learning by directly augmenting the training images through leveraging the vast unlabeled instances. Precisely our proposed Self-Jig algorithm can synthesize new images from the labeled probe and unlabeled gallery images. The labels of gallery images are predicted to help the augmentation process, which can be taken as a self-training scheme. Intrinsically, we argue that we provide a very useful way of directly generating massive amounts of training images for novel classes. Extensive experiments and ablation study not only evaluate the efficacy but also reveal the insights, of the proposed Self-Jig method.
End-to-End Safe Reinforcement Learning through Barrier Functions for Safety-Critical Continuous Control Tasks
Authors: Cheng Richard , Orosz Gábor , Murray Richard M. , Burdick Joel W.
Published: September 2019

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break before an optimal controller can be learned. To address this issue, we propose a controller architecture that combines (1) a model-free RL-based controller with (2) model-based controllers utilizing control barrier functions (CBFs) and (3) online learning of the unknown system dynamics, in order to ensure safety during learning. Our general framework leverages the success of RL algorithms to learn high-performance controllers, while the CBF-based controllers both guarantee safety and guide the learning process by constraining the set of explorable polices. We utilize Gaussian Processes (GPs) to model the system dynamics and its uncertainties.

Our novel controller synthesis algorithm, RL-CBF, guarantees safety with high probability during the learning process, regardless of the RL algorithm used, and demonstrates greater policy exploration efficiency. We test our algorithm on (1) control of an inverted pendulum and (2) autonomous carfollowing with wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and show that our algorithm attains much greater sample efficiency in learning than other state-of-the-art algorithms and maintains safety during the entire learning process.
Utilizing Class Information for Deep Network Representation Shaping
Authors: Choi Daeyoung , Rhee Wonjong
Published: September 2019

Statistical characteristics of deep network representations, such as sparsity and correlation, are known to be relevant to the performance and interpretability of deep learning. When a statistical characteristic is desired, often an adequate regularizer can be designed and applied during the training phase. Typically, such a regularizer aims to manipulate a statistical characteristic over all classes together. For classification tasks, however, it might be advantageous to enforce the desired characteristic per class such that different classes can be better distinguished. Motivated by the idea, we design two class-wise regularizers that explicitly utilize class information: class-wise Covariance Regularizer (cw-CR) and classwise Variance Regularizer (cw-VR). cw-CR targets to reduce the covariance of representations calculated from the same class samples for encouraging feature independence. cw-VR is similar, but variance instead of covariance is targeted to improve feature compactness. For the sake of completeness, their counterparts without using class information, Covariance Regularizer (CR) and Variance Regularizer (VR), are considered together. The four regularizers are conceptually simple and computationally very efficient, and the visualization shows that the regularizers indeed perform distinct representation shaping. In terms of classification performance, significant improvements over the baseline and L1/L2 weight regularization methods were found for 21 out of 22 tasks over popular benchmark datasets. In particular, cw-VR achieved the best performance for 13 tasks including ResNet-32/110.
Diverse Exploration via Conjugate Policies for Policy Gradient Methods
Authors: Cohen Andrew , Qiao Xingye , Yu Lei , Way Elliot , Tong Xiangrong
Published: September 2019

We address the challenge of effective exploration while maintaining good performance in policy gradient methods. As a solution, we propose diverse exploration (DE) via conjugate policies. DE learns and deploys a set of conjugate policies which can be conveniently generated as a byproduct of conjugate gradient descent. We provide both theoretical and empirical results showing the effectiveness of DE at achieving exploration, improving policy performance, and the advantage of DE over exploration by random policy perturbations.
Spatially Invariant Unsupervised Object Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Crawford Eric , Pineau Joelle
Published: September 2019

There are many reasons to expect an ability to reason in terms of objects to be a crucial skill for any generally intelligent agent. Indeed, recent machine learning literature is replete with examples of the benefits of object-like representations: generalization, transfer to new tasks, and interpretability, among others. However, in order to reason in terms of objects, agents need a way of discovering and detecting objects in the visual world - a task which we call unsupervised object detection. This task has received significantly less attention in the literature than its supervised counterpart, especially in the case of large images containing many objects. In the current work, we develop a neural network architecture that effectively addresses this large-image, many-object setting. In particular, we combine ideas from Attend, Infer, Repeat (AIR), which performs unsupervised object detection but does not scale well, with recent developments in supervised object detection. We replace AIR’s core recurrent network with a convolutional (and thus spatially invariant) network, and make use of an object-specification scheme that describes the location of objects with respect to local grid cells rather than the image as a whole. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate a number of features of our architecture: that, unlike AIR, it is able to discover and detect objects in large, many-object scenes; that it has a significant ability to generalize to images that are larger and contain more objects than images encountered during training; and that it is able to discover and detect objects with enough accuracy to facilitate non-trivial downstream processing.
Learning Segmentation Masks with the Independence Prior
Authors: Dai Songmin , Li Xiaoqiang , Wang Lu , Wu Pin , Tong Weiqin , Chen Yimin
Published: September 2019

An instance with a bad mask might make a composite image that uses it look fake. This encourages us to learn segmentation by generating realistic composite images. To achieve this, we propose a novel framework that exploits a new proposed prior called the independence prior based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The generator produces an image with multiple category-specific instance providers, a layout module and a composition module. Firstly, each provider independently outputs a category-specific instance image with a soft mask. Then the provided instances’ poses are corrected by the layout module. Lastly, the composition module combines these instances into a final image. Training with adversarial loss and penalty for mask area, each provider learns a mask that is as small as possible but enough to cover a complete category-specific instance. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation methods widely use grouping cues modeling the association between image parts, which are either artificially designed or learned with costly segmentation labels or only modeled on local pairs. Unlike them, our method automatically models the dependence between any parts and learns instance segmentation. We apply our framework in two cases: (1) Foreground segmentation on category-specific images with box-level annotation. (2) Unsupervised learning of instance appearances and masks with only one image of homogeneous object cluster (HOC). We get appealing results in both tasks, which shows the independence prior is useful for instance segmentation and it is possible to unsupervisedly learn instance masks with only one image.
Inverse Abstraction of Neural Networks Using Symbolic Interpolation
Authors: Dathathri Sumanth , Gao Sicun , Murray Richard M.
Published: September 2019

Neural networks in real-world applications have to satisfy critical properties such as safety and reliability. The analysis of such properties typically requires extracting information through computing pre-images of the network transformations, but it is well-known that explicit computation of pre-images is intractable. We introduce new methods for computing compact symbolic abstractions of pre-images by computing their overapproximations and underapproximations through all layers. The abstraction of pre-images enables formal analysis and knowledge extraction without affecting standard learning algorithms. We use inverse abstractions to automatically extract simple control laws and compact representations for pre-images corresponding to unsafe outputs. We illustrate that the extracted abstractions are interpretable and can be used for analyzing complex properties.
Linear Kernel Tests via Empirical Likelihood for High-Dimensional Data
Authors: Ding Lizhong , Liu Zhi , Li Yu , Liao Shizhong , Liu Yong , Yang Peng , Yu Ge , Shao Ling , Gao Xin
Published: September 2019

We propose a framework for analyzing and comparing distributions without imposing any parametric assumptions via empirical likelihood methods. Our framework is used to study two fundamental statistical test problems: the two-sample test and the goodness-of-fit test. For the two-sample test, we need to determine whether two groups of samples are from different distributions; for the goodness-of-fit test, we examine how likely it is that a set of samples is generated from a known target distribution. Specifically, we propose empirical likelihood ratio (ELR) statistics for the two-sample test and the goodness-of-fit test, both of which are of linear time complexity and show higher power (i.e., the probability of correctly rejecting the null hypothesis) than the existing linear statistics for high-dimensional data. We prove the nonparametric Wilks’ theorems for the ELR statistics, which illustrate that the limiting distributions of the proposed ELR statistics are chi-square distributions. With these limiting distributions, we can avoid bootstraps or simulations to determine the threshold for rejecting the null hypothesis, which makes the ELR statistics more efficient than the recently proposed linear statistic, finite set Stein discrepancy (FSSD). We also prove the consistency of the ELR statistics, which guarantees that the test power goes to 1 as the number of samples goes to infinity. In addition, we experimentally demonstrate and theoretically analyze that FSSD has poor performance or even fails to test for high-dimensional data. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of our ELR statistics as compared to state-of-the-art linear statistics.
Approximate Kernel Selection with Strong Approximate Consistency
Authors: Ding Lizhong , Liu Yong , Liao Shizhong , Li Yu , Yang Peng , Pan Yijie , Huang Chao , Shao Ling , Gao Xin
Published: September 2019

Kernel selection is fundamental to the generalization performance of kernel-based learning algorithms. Approximate kernel selection is an efficient kernel selection approach that exploits the convergence property of the kernel selection criteria and the computational virtue of kernel matrix approximation. The convergence property is measured by the notion of approximate consistency. For the existing Nyström approximations, whose sampling distributions are independent of the specific learning task at hand, it is difficult to establish the strong approximate consistency. They mainly focus on the quality of the low-rank matrix approximation, rather than the performance of the kernel selection criterion used in conjunction with the approximate matrix. In this paper, we propose a novel Nyström approximate kernel selection algorithm by customizing a criterion-driven adaptive sampling distribution for the Nyström approximation, which adaptively reduces the error between the approximate and accurate criteria. We theoretically derive the strong approximate consistency of the proposed Nyström approximate kernel selection algorithm. Finally, we empirically evaluate the approximate consistency of our algorithm as compared to state-of-the-art methods.
On-Line Adaptative Curriculum Learning for GANs
Authors: Doan Thang , Monteiro João , Albuquerque Isabela , Mazoure Bogdan , Durand Audrey , Pineau Joelle , Hjelm R. Devon
Published: September 2019

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can successfully approximate a probability distribution and produce realistic samples. However, open questions such as sufficient convergence conditions and mode collapse still persist. In this paper, we build on existing work in the area by proposing a novel framework for training the generator against an ensemble of discriminator networks, which can be seen as a one-student/multiple-teachers setting. We formalize this problem within the full-information adversarial bandit framework, where we evaluate the capability of an algorithm to select mixtures of discriminators for providing the generator with feedback during learning. To this end, we propose a reward function which reflects the progress made by the generator and dynamically update the mixture weights allocated to each discriminator. We also draw connections between our algorithm and stochastic optimization methods and then show that existing approaches using multiple discriminators in literature can be recovered from our framework. We argue that less expressive discriminators are smoother and have a general coarse grained view of the modes map, which enforces the generator to cover a wide portion of the data distribution support. On the other hand, highly expressive discriminators ensure samples quality. Finally, experimental results show that our approach improves samples quality and diversity over existing baselines by effectively learning a curriculum. These results also support the claim that weaker discriminators have higher entropy improving modes coverage.
Multistream Classification with Relative Density Ratio Estimation
Authors: Dong Bo , Gao Yang , Chandra Swarup , Khan Latifur
Published: September 2019

In supervised learning, availability of sufficient labeled data is of prime importance. Unfortunately, they are sparingly available in many real-world applications. Particularly when performing classification over a non-stationary data stream, unavailability of sufficient labeled data undermines the classifier’s long-term performance by limiting its adaptability to changes in data distribution over time. Recently, studies in such settings have appealed to transfer learning techniques over a data stream while detecting drifts in data distribution over time. Here, the data stream is represented by two independent non-stationary streams, one containing labeled data instances (called source stream) having a biased distribution compared to the unlabeled data instances (called target stream). The task of label prediction under this representation is called Multistream Classification, where instances in the two streams occur independently. While these studies have addressed various challenges in the multistream setting, it still suffers from large computational overhead mainly due to frequent bias correction and drift adaptation methods employed. In this paper, we focus on utilizing an alternative bias correction technique, called relative density-ratio estimation, which is known to be computationally faster. Importantly, we propose a novel mechanism to automatically learn an appropriate mixture of relative density that adapts to changes in the multistream setting over time. We theoretically study its properties and empirically demonstrate its superior performance, within a multistream framework called MSCRDR, on benchmark datasets by comparing with other competing methods.
How to Combine Tree-Search Methods in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Efroni Yonathan , Dalal Gal , Scherrer Bruno , Mannor Shie
Published: September 2019

Finite-horizon lookahead policies are abundantly used in Reinforcement Learning and demonstrate impressive empirical success. Usually, the lookahead policies are implemented with specific planning methods such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (e.g. in AlphaZero (Silver et al. 2017b)). Referring to the planning problem as tree search, a reasonable practice in these implementations is to back up the value only at the leaves while the information obtained at the root is not leveraged other than for updating the policy. Here, we question the potency of this approach. Namely, the latter procedure is non-contractive in general, and its convergence is not guaranteed. Our proposed enhancement is straightforward and simple: use the return from the optimal tree path to back up the values at the descendants of the root. This leads to a γh-contracting procedure, where γ is the discount factor and h is the tree depth. To establish our results, we first introduce a notion called multiple-step greedy consistency. We then provide convergence rates for two algorithmic instantiations of the above enhancement in the presence of noise injected to both the tree search stage and value estimation stage.
Human-Like Delicate Region Erasing Strategy for Weakly Supervised Detection
Authors: En Qing , Duan Lijuan , Zhang Zhaoxiang , Bai Xiang , Zhang Yundong
Published: September 2019

We explore a principle method to address the weakly supervised detection problem. Many deep learning methods solve weakly supervised detection by mining various object proposal or pooling strategies, which may cause redundancy and generate a coarse location. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel human-like active searching strategy that recurrently ignores the background and discovers class-specific objects by erasing undesired pixels from the image. The proposed detector acts as an agent, providing guidance to erase unremarkable regions and eventually concentrating the attention on the foreground. The proposed agents, which are composed of a deep Q-network and are trained by the Q-learning algorithm, analyze the contents of the image features to infer the localization action according to the learned policy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply reinforcement learning to address weakly supervised localization with only image-level labels. Consequently, the proposed method is validated on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of locating a single object within 5 steps and has great significance to the research on weakly supervised localization with a human-like mechanism.
Controllable Image-to-Video Translation: A Case Study on Facial Expression Generation
Authors: Fan Lijie , Huang Wenbing , Gan Chuang , Huang Junzhou , Gong Boqing
Published: September 2019

The recent advances in deep learning have made it possible to generate photo-realistic images by using neural networks and even to extrapolate video frames from an input video clip. In this paper, for the sake of both furthering this exploration and our own interest in a realistic application, we study imageto-video translation and particularly focus on the videos of facial expressions. This problem challenges the deep neural networks by another temporal dimension comparing to the image-to-image translation. Moreover, its single input image fails most existing video generation methods that rely on recurrent models. We propose a user-controllable approach so as to generate video clips of various lengths from a single face image. The lengths and types of the expressions are controlled by users. To this end, we design a novel neural network architecture that can incorporate the user input into its skip connections and propose several improvements to the adversarial training method for the neural network. Experiments and user studies verify the effectiveness of our approach. Especially, we would like to highlight that even for the face images in the wild (downloaded from the Web and the authors’ own photos), our model can generate high-quality facial expression videos of which about 50% are labeled as real by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.
Pattern-Based Approach to the Workflow Satisfiability Problem with User-Independent Constraints
Authors: Karapetyan Daniel , Parkes Andrew J. , Gutin Gregory , Gagarin Andrei
Published: September 2019

The fixed parameter tractable (FPT) approach is a powerful tool in tackling computationally hard problems.  In this paper, we link FPT results to classic artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to show how they complement each other.  Specifically, we consider the workflow satisfiability problem (WSP) which asks whether there exists an assignment of authorised users to the steps in a workflow specification, subject to certain constraints on the assignment.  It was shown by Cohen et al. (JAIR 2014) that WSP restricted to the class of user-independent constraints (UI), covering many practical cases, admits FPT algorithms, i.e. can be solved in time exponential only in the number of steps k and polynomial in the number of users n.  Since usually k << n in WSP, such FPT algorithms are of great practical interest. We present a new interpretation of the FPT nature of the WSP with UI constraints giving a decomposition of the problem into two levels.  Exploiting this two-level split, we develop a new FPT algorithm that is by many orders of magnitude faster than the previous state-of-the-art WSP algorithm and also has only polynomial-space complexity.  We also introduce new pseudo-Boolean (PB) and Constraint Satisfaction (CSP) formulations of the WSP with UI constraints which efficiently exploit this new decomposition of the problem and raise the novel issue of how to use general-purpose solvers to tackle FPT problems in a fashion that meets FPT efficiency expectations.  In our computational study, we investigate, for the first time, the phase transition (PT) properties of the WSP, under a model for generation of random instances.  We show how PT studies can be extended, in a novel fashion, to support empirical evaluation of scaling of FPT algorithms.
[RETRACTED] The anticancer effect of Quercetin loaded chitosan nanoparticles, 5-fluorouracil loaded chitosan nanoparticles and dual Quercetin- 5-fluorouracil loaded chitosan nanoparticles against tongue Scc-090 cell line ( In vitro study) v1
Authors: Louloua Mohammed Fathy Dr.
Published: September 2019

[RETRACTED]
Memoria social, literatura e historia da educación
Authors: Costa Rico Antón , Bolaño Amigo Uxía
Published: September 2019

A escrita literaria de Agustín F. Paz reflectiu en distintos momentos variadas escenas da vida escolar en Galicia durante o tempo do Franquismo e da Transición. O presente texto pretende facer “dialogar” as narracións do escritor coas escrituras doutros autores galegos que tamén se achegaron á memoria da escola, compoñendo así un caleidoscopio de miradas que nos traslada algunhas suxerentes imaxes históricas, mais tamén doídas críticas sobre aquela escola.
A representación da escola e da educación na obra literaria de Agustín Fernández Paz
Authors: Soto Isabel , Senín Rafael
Published: September 2019

Realízase un percorrido por aqueles libros de Agustín Fernández Paz en que aparece a escola, co fin de analizar como plasmou nas súas ficcións un modelo de escola democrático, integrador e galeguizador, en claro contraste cun sistema caduco canto a procedementos e metodoloxías, que acolle a violencia e perpetúa as diferenzas. Dedícase tamén un apartado ás obras con que homenaxeou mestres e mestras represaliados durante a Guerra Civil española e a posguerra, así como as ideas educativas que estes defenderon na procura dunha sociedade xusta e igualitaria.
De como a literatura transforma a vida das persoas
Authors: Penas Presas Montse
Published: September 2019

Este artigo parte da constatación de que a maioría das obras de Agustín Fernández Paz conteñen numerosísimas referencias aos libros e á lectura. Tras unha concisa explicación das trabes da escrita deste autor, explóranse as posibles funcións que a referencia a obras esenciais da literatura ten na súa produción, partindo tanto do que ten achegado a antropoloxía da lectura, como dos propios textos do autor. Igualmente, resáltanse as estratexias empregadas para achegar a mocidade á lectura. En consonancia con isto, deféndese a idea de que parte importante da súa laboura creativa se pode entender como un completo plan de animación á lectura ideado para o lectorado novo.
O Educador, alén de magnífico escritor, Agustín Fernández Paz
Authors: Costa Rico Antón , Vázquez Freire Miguel
Published: September 2019

In memorian: Agustín Fernández Paz.