TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: Multi Expression Programming (MEP) is an evolutionary technique that may be used for solving computationally difficult problems. MEP uses a linear solution representation. Each MEP individual is a string encoding complex expressions (computer programs). A MEP individual may encode multiple solutions of the current problem. In this paper MEP is used for evolving a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) heuristic for graphs satisfying triangle inequality. Evolved MEP heuristic is compared with Nearest Neighbor Heuristic (NN) and Minimum Spanning Tree Heuristic (MST) on some difficult problems in TSPLIB. For most of the considered problems the evolved MEP heuristic outperforms NN and MST. The obtained algorithm was tested against some problems in TSPLIB. The results emphasizes that evolved MEP heuristic is a powerful tool for solving difficult TSP instances.

SOLUTION: Evolving TSP heuristics using Multi Expression Programming

PROBLEM: In this work we aim to discover high quality speech features and linguistic units directly from unlabeled speech data in a zero resource scenario. The results are evaluated using the metrics and corpora proposed in the Zero Resource Speech Challenge organized at Interspeech 2015. A Multi-layered Acoustic Tokenizer (MAT) was proposed for automatic discovery of multiple sets of acoustic tokens from the given corpus. Each acoustic token set is specified by a set of hyperparameters that describe the model configuration. These sets of acoustic tokens carry different characteristics fof the given corpus and the language behind, thus can be mutually reinforced. The multiple sets of token labels are then used as the targets of a Multi-target Deep Neural Network (MDNN) trained on low-level acoustic features. Bottleneck features extracted from the MDNN are then used as the feedback input to the MAT and the MDNN itself in the next iteration. We call this iterative deep learning framework the Multi-layered Acoustic Tokenizing Deep Neural Network (MAT-DNN), which generates both high quality speech features for the Track 1 of the Challenge and acoustic tokens for the Track 2 of the Challenge. In addition, we performed extra experiments on the same corpora on the application of query-by-example spoken term detection. The experimental results showed the iterative deep learning framework of MAT-DNN improved the detection performance due to better underlying speech features and acoustic tokens.

SOLUTION: AN ITERATIVE DEEP LEARNING FRAMEWORK FOR UNSUPERVISED DISCOVERY OF SPEECH FEATURES AND LINGUISTIC UNITS WITH APPLICATIONS ON SPOKEN TERM DETECTION

PROBLEM: We present an approach for the verification of feed-forward neural networks in which all nodes have a piece-wise linear activation function. Such networks are often used in deep learning and have been shown to be hard to verify for modern satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) and integer linear programming (ILP) solvers. The starting point of our approach is the addition of a global linear approximation of the overall network behavior to the verification problem that helps with SMT-like reasoning over the network behavior. We present a specialized verification algorithm that employs this approximation in a search process in which it infers additional node phases for the non-linear nodes in the network from partial node phase assignments, similar to unit propagation in classical SAT solving. We also show how to infer additional conflict clauses and safe node fixtures from the results of the analysis steps performed during the search. The resulting approach is evaluated on collision avoidance and handwritten digit recognition case studies.

SOLUTION:
Formal Verification of Piece-Wise Linear Feed-Forward Neural Networks