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    arXiv Paper Daily: Thu, 1 Dec 2016

    我爱机器学习(52ml.net)发表于 2016-12-01 00:00:00
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    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

    An Artificial Agent for Robust Image Registration

    Rui Liao, Shun Miao, Pierre de Tournemire, Sasa Grbic, Ali Kamen, Tommaso Mansi, Dorin Comaniciu
    Comments: To appear in AAAI Conference 2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    3-D image registration, which involves aligning two or more images, is a
    critical step in a variety of medical applications from diagnosis to therapy.
    Image registration is commonly performed by optimizing an image matching metric
    as a cost function. However, this task is challenging due to the non-convex
    nature of the matching metric over the plausible registration parameter space
    and insufficient approaches for a robust optimization. As a result, current
    approaches are often customized to a specific problem and sensitive to image
    quality and artifacts. In this paper, we propose a completely different
    approach to image registration, inspired by how experts perform the task. We
    first cast the image registration problem as a “strategy learning” process,
    where the goal is to find the best sequence of motion actions (e.g. up, down,
    etc.) that yields image alignment. Within this approach, an artificial agent is
    learned, modeled using deep convolutional neural networks, with 3D raw image
    data as the input, and the next optimal action as the output. To cope with the
    dimensionality of the problem, we propose a greedy supervised approach for an
    end-to-end training, coupled with attention-driven hierarchical strategy. The
    resulting registration approach inherently encodes both a data-driven matching
    metric and an optimal registration strategy (policy). We demonstrate, on two
    3-D/3-D medical image registration examples with drastically different nature
    of challenges, that the artificial agent outperforms several state-of-art
    registration methods by a large margin in terms of both accuracy and
    robustness.

    Sync-DRAW: Automatic GIF Generation using Deep Recurrent Attentive Architectures

    Gaurav Mittal, Tanya Marwah, Vineeth Balasubramanian
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper introduces a novel approach for generating GIFs called
    Synchronized Deep Recurrent Attentive Writer (Sync-DRAW). Sync-DRAW employs a
    Recurrent Variational Autoencoder (R-VAE) and an attention mechanism in a
    hierarchical manner to create a temporally dependent sequence of frames that
    are gradually formed over time. The attention mechanism in Sync-DRAW attends to
    each individual frame of the GIF in sychronization, while the R-VAE learns a
    latent distribution for the entire GIF at the global level. We studied the
    performance of our Sync-DRAW network on the Bouncing MNIST GIFs Dataset and
    also, the newly available TGIF dataset. Experiments have suggested that
    Sync-DRAW is efficient in learning the spatial and temporal information of the
    GIFs and generates frames where objects have high structural integrity.
    Moreover, we also demonstrate that Sync-DRAW can be extended to even generate
    GIFs automatically given just text captions.

    End-to-End Training of Hybrid CNN-CRF Models for Stereo

    Patrick Knöbelreiter, Christian Reinbacher, Alexander Shekhovtsov, Thomas Pock
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    We propose a novel method for stereo estimation, combining advantages of
    convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and optimization-based approaches. The
    optimization, posed as a conditional random field (CRF), takes local matching
    costs and consistency-enforcing (smoothness) costs as inputs, both estimated by
    CNN blocks. To perform the inference in the CRF we use an approach based on
    linear programming relaxation with a fixed number of iterations. We address the
    challenging problem of training this hybrid model end-to-end. We show that in
    the discriminative formulation (structured support vector machine) the training
    is practically feasible. The trained hybrid model with shallow CNNs is
    comparable to state-of-the-art deep models in both time and performance. The
    optimization part efficiently replaces sophisticated and not jointly trainable
    (but commonly applied) post-processing steps by a trainable, well-understood
    model.

    POSEidon: Face-from-Depth for Driver Pose Estimation

    Guido Borghi, Marco Venturelli, Roberto Vezzani, Rita Cucchiara
    Comments: Submitted to Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2017)
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Fast and accurate upper-body and head pose estimation is a key task for
    automatic monitoring of driver attention, a challenging context characterized
    by severe illumination changes, occlusions and extreme poses. In this work, we
    present a new deep learning framework for head localization and pose estimation
    on depth images. The core of the proposal is a regression neural network,
    called POSEidon, which is composed of three independent convolutional nets
    followed by a fusion layer, specially conceived for understanding the pose by
    depth. In addition, to recover the intrinsic value of face appearance for
    understanding head position and orientation, we propose a new Face-from-Depth
    approach for learning image faces from depth. Results in face reconstruction
    are qualitatively impressive. We test the proposed framework on two public
    datasets, namely Biwi Kinect Head Pose and ICT-3DHP, and on Pandora, a new
    challenging dataset mainly inspired by the automotive setup. Results show that
    our method overcomes all recent state-of-art works, running in real time at
    more than 30 frames per second.

    Combining Data-driven and Model-driven Methods for Robust Facial Landmark Detection

    Hongwen Zhang, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun
    Comments: Submitted to CVPR 2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Facial landmark detection is an important but challenging task for real-world
    computer vision applications. This paper proposes an accurate and robust
    approach for facial landmark detection by combining data-driven and
    model-driven methods. Firstly, a fully convolutional network (FCN) is trained
    to generate response maps of all facial landmark points. Such a data-driven
    method can make full use of holistic information in a facial image for global
    estimation of facial landmarks. Secondly, the maximum points in the response
    maps are fitted with a pre-trained point distribution model (PDM) to generate
    initial facial landmark shape. Such a model-driven method can correct the
    location errors of outliers by considering shape prior information. Thirdly, a
    weighted version of Regularized Landmark Mean-Shift (RLMS) is proposed to
    fine-tune facial landmark shapes iteratively. The weighting strategy is based
    on the confidence of convolutional response maps so that FCN is integrated into
    the framework of Constrained Local Model (CLM). Such an
    Estimation-Correction-Tuning process perfectly combines the global robustness
    advantage of data-driven method (FCN), outlier correction advantage of
    model-driven method (PDM) and non-parametric optimization advantage of RLMS.
    The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms
    state-of-the-art solutions on the 300-W dataset. Our approach is well-suited
    for face images with large poses, exaggerated expression, and occlusions.

    User Dependent Features in Online Signature Verification

    D. S. Guru, K. S. Manjunatha, S. Manjunath
    Comments: 12 pages
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this paper, we propose a novel approach for verification of on-line
    signatures based on user dependent feature selection and symbolic
    representation. Unlike other signature verification methods, which work with
    same features for all users, the proposed approach introduces the concept of
    user dependent features. It exploits the typicality of each and every user to
    select different features for different users. Initially all possible features
    are extracted for all users and a method of feature selection is employed for
    selecting user dependent features. The selected features are clustered using
    Fuzzy C means algorithm. In order to preserve the intra-class variation within
    each user, we recommend to represent each cluster in the form of an interval
    valued symbolic feature vector. A method of signature verification based on the
    proposed cluster based symbolic representation is also presented. Extensive
    experimentations are conducted on MCYT-100 User (DB1) and MCYT-330 User (DB2)
    online signature data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
    novel approach.

    Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition

    Zifeng Wu, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel
    Comments: Code available at: this https URL
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    The trend towards increasingly deep neural networks has been driven by a
    general observation that increasing depth increases the performance of a
    network. Recently, however, evidence has been amassing that simply increasing
    depth may not be the best way to increase performance, particularly given other
    limitations. Investigations into deep residual networks have also suggested
    that they may not in fact be operating as a single deep network, but rather as
    an ensemble of many relatively shallow networks. We examine these issues, and
    in doing so arrive at a new interpretation of the unravelled view of deep
    residual networks which explains some of the behaviours that have been observed
    experimentally. As a result, we are able to derive a new, shallower,
    architecture of residual networks which significantly outperforms much deeper
    models such as ResNet-200 on the ImageNet classification dataset. We also show
    that this performance is transferable to other problem domains by developing a
    semantic segmentation approach which outperforms the state-of-the-art by a
    remarkable margin on datasets including PASCAL VOC, PASCAL Context, and
    Cityscapes. The architecture that we propose thus outperforms its comparators,
    including very deep ResNets, and yet is more efficient in memory use and
    sometimes also in training time. The code and models are available at
    this https URL

    Fast Supervised Discrete Hashing and its Analysis

    Gou Koutaki, Keiichiro Shirai, Mitsuru Ambai
    Comments: 12 pages
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG); Multimedia (cs.MM)

    In this paper, we propose a learning-based supervised discrete hashing
    method. Binary hashing is widely used for large-scale image retrieval as well
    as video and document searches because the compact representation of binary
    code is essential for data storage and reasonable for query searches using
    bit-operations. The recently proposed Supervised Discrete Hashing (SDH)
    efficiently solves mixed-integer programming problems by alternating
    optimization and the Discrete Cyclic Coordinate descent (DCC) method. We show
    that the SDH model can be simplified without performance degradation based on
    some preliminary experiments; we call the approximate model for this the “Fast
    SDH” (FSDH) model. We analyze the FSDH model and provide a mathematically exact
    solution for it. In contrast to SDH, our model does not require an alternating
    optimization algorithm and does not depend on initial values. FSDH is also
    easier to implement than Iterative Quantization (ITQ). Experimental results
    involving a large-scale database showed that FSDH outperforms conventional SDH
    in terms of precision, recall, and computation time.

    Speed/accuracy trade-offs for modern convolutional object detectors

    Jonathan Huang, Vivek Rathod, Chen Sun, Menglong Zhu, Anoop Korattikara, Alireza Fathi, Ian Fischer, Zbigniew Wojna, Yang Song, Sergio Guadarrama, Kevin Murphy
    Comments: A version of this paper is currently under submission to CVPR 2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this paper, we study the trade-off between accuracy and speed when
    building an object detection system based on convolutional neural networks. We
    consider three main families of detectors — Faster R-CNN, R-FCN and SSD —
    which we view as “meta-architectures”. Each of these can be combined with
    different kinds of feature extractors, such as VGG, Inception or ResNet. In
    addition, we can vary other parameters, such as the image resolution, and the
    number of box proposals. We develop a unified framework (in Tensorflow) that
    enables us to perform a fair comparison between all of these variants. We
    analyze the performance of many different previously published model
    combinations, as well as some novel ones, and thus identify a set of models
    which achieve different points on the speed-accuracy tradeoff curve, ranging
    from fast models, suitable for use on a mobile phone, to a much slower model
    that achieves a new state of the art on the COCO detection challenge.

    Deep Cuboid Detection: Beyond 2D Bounding Boxes

    Debidatta Dwibedi, Tomasz Malisiewicz, Vijay Badrinarayanan, Andrew Rabinovich
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    We present a Deep Cuboid Detector which takes a consumer-quality RGB image of
    a cluttered scene and localizes all 3D cuboids (box-like objects). Contrary to
    classical approaches which fit a 3D model from low-level cues like corners,
    edges, and vanishing points, we propose an end-to-end deep learning system to
    detect cuboids across many semantic categories (e.g., ovens, shipping boxes,
    and furniture). We localize cuboids with a 2D bounding box, and simultaneously
    localize the cuboid’s corners, effectively producing a 3D interpretation of
    box-like objects. We refine keypoints by pooling convolutional features
    iteratively, improving the baseline method significantly. Our deep learning
    cuboid detector is trained in an end-to-end fashion and is suitable for
    real-time applications in augmented reality (AR) and robotics.

    Modeling Relationships in Referential Expressions with Compositional Modular Networks

    Ronghang Hu, Marcus Rohrbach, Jacob Andreas, Trevor Darrell, Kate Saenko
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    People often refer to entities in an image in terms of their relationships
    with other entities. For example, “the black cat sitting under the table”
    refers to both a “black cat” entity and its relationship with another “table”
    entity. Understanding these relationships is essential for interpreting and
    grounding such natural language expressions. Most prior work focuses on either
    grounding entire referential expressions holistically to one region, or
    localizing relationships based on a fixed set of categories. In this paper we
    instead present a modular deep architecture capable of analyzing referential
    expressions into their component parts, identifying entities and relationships
    mentioned in the input expression and grounding them all in the scene. We call
    this approach Compositional Modular Networks (CMNs): a novel architecture that
    learns linguistic analysis and visual inference end-to-end. Our approach is
    built around two types of neural modules that inspect local regions and
    pairwise interactions between regions. We evaluate CMNs on multiple referential
    expression datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on all tasks.

    High-Resolution Image Inpainting using Multi-Scale Neural Patch Synthesis

    Chao Yang, Xin Lu, Zhe Lin, Eli Shechtman, Oliver Wang, Hao Li
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Recent advances in deep learning have shown exciting promise in filling large
    holes in natural images with semantically plausible and context aware details,
    impacting fundamental image manipulation tasks such as object removal. While
    these learning-based methods are significantly more effective in capturing
    high-level features than prior techniques, they can only handle very
    low-resolution inputs due to memory limitations and difficulty in training.
    Even for slightly larger images, the inpainted regions would appear blurry and
    unpleasant boundaries become visible. We propose a multi-scale neural patch
    synthesis approach based on joint optimization of image content and texture
    constraints, which not only preserves contextual structures but also produces
    high-frequency details by matching and adapting patches with the most similar
    mid-layer feature correlations of a deep classification network. We evaluate
    our method on the ImageNet and Paris Streetview datasets and achieved
    state-of-the-art inpainting accuracy. We show our approach produces sharper and
    more coherent results than prior methods, especially for high-resolution
    images.

    Sequential Person Recognition in Photo Albums with a Recurrent Network

    Yao Li, Guosheng Lin, Bohan Zhuang, Lingqiao Liu, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Recognizing the identities of people in everyday photos is still a very
    challenging problem for machine vision, due to non-frontal faces, changes in
    clothing, location, lighting and similar. Recent studies have shown that rich
    relational information between people in the same photo can help in recognizing
    their identities. In this work, we propose to model the relational information
    between people as a sequence prediction task. At the core of our work is a
    novel recurrent network architecture, in which relational information between
    instances’ labels and appearance are modeled jointly. In addition to relational
    cues, scene context is incorporated in our sequence prediction model with no
    additional cost. In this sense, our approach is a unified framework for
    modeling both contextual cues and visual appearance of person instances. Our
    model is trained end-to-end with a sequence of annotated instances in a photo
    as inputs, and a sequence of corresponding labels as targets. We demonstrate
    that this simple but elegant formulation achieves state-of-the-art performance
    on the newly released People In Photo Albums (PIPA) dataset.

    Semantic Facial Expression Editing using Autoencoded Flow

    Raymond Yeh, Ziwei Liu, Dan B Goldman, Aseem Agarwala
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    High-level manipulation of facial expressions in images — such as changing
    a smile to a neutral expression — is challenging because facial expression
    changes are highly non-linear, and vary depending on the appearance of the
    face. We present a fully automatic approach to editing faces that combines the
    advantages of flow-based face manipulation with the more recent generative
    capabilities of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). During training, our model
    learns to encode the flow from one expression to another over a low-dimensional
    latent space. At test time, expression editing can be done simply using latent
    vector arithmetic. We evaluate our methods on two applications: 1) single-image
    facial expression editing, and 2) facial expression interpolation between two
    images. We demonstrate that our method generates images of higher perceptual
    quality than previous VAE and flow-based methods.

    Attend in groups: a weakly-supervised deep learning framework for learning from web data

    Bohan Zhuang, Lingqiao Liu, Yao Li, Chunhua Shen, Ian Reid
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Large-scale datasets have driven the rapid development of deep neural
    networks for visual recognition. However, annotating a massive dataset is
    expensive and time-consuming. Web images and their labels are, in comparison,
    much easier to obtain, but direct training on such automatically harvested
    images can lead to unsatisfactory performance, because the noisy labels of Web
    images adversely affect the learned recognition models. To address this
    drawback we propose an end-to-end weakly-supervised deep learning framework
    which is robust to the label noise in Web images. The proposed framework relies
    on two unified strategies — random grouping and attention — to effectively
    reduce the negative impact of noisy web image annotations. Specifically, random
    grouping stacks multiple images into a single training instance and thus
    increases the labeling accuracy at the instance level. Attention, on the other
    hand, suppresses the noisy signals from both incorrectly labeled images and
    less discriminative image regions. By conducting intensive experiments on two
    challenging datasets, including a newly collected fine-grained dataset with Web
    images of different car models, the superior performance of the proposed
    methods over competitive baselines is clearly demonstrated.

    Efficient Likelihood Bayesian Constrained Local Model

    Hailiang Li, Kin-Man Lam, Man-Yau Chiu, Kangheng Wu, Zhibin Lei
    Comments: 6 pages, for submitting to ICME-2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    The constrained local model (CLM) proposes a paradigm that the locations of a
    set of local landmark detectors are constrained to lie in a subspace, spanned
    by a shape point distribution model (PDM). Fitting the model to an object
    involves two steps. A response map, which represents the likelihood of the
    location of a landmark, is first computed for each landmark using local-texture
    detectors. Then, an optimal PDM is determined by jointly maximizing all the
    response maps simultaneously, with a global shape constraint. This global
    optimization can be considered as a Bayesian inference problem, where the
    posterior distribution of the shape parameters, as well as the pose parameters,
    can be inferred using maximum a posteriori (MAP). In this paper, we present a
    cascaded face-alignment approach, which employs random-forest regressors to
    estimate the positions of each landmark, as a likelihood term, efficiently in
    the CLM model. Interpretation from CLM framework, this algorithm is named as an
    efficient likelihood Bayesian constrained local model (elBCLM). Furthermore, in
    each stage of the regressors, the PDM non-rigid parameters of previous stage
    can work as shape clues for training each stage regressors. Experimental
    results on benchmarks show our approach achieve about 3 to 5 times speed-up
    compared with CLM models and improve around 10% on fitting quality compare with
    the same setting regression models.

    Weakly-supervised Discriminative Patch Learning via CNN for Fine-grained Recognition

    Yaming Wang, Vlad I. Morariu, Larry S. Davis
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Trending research on fine-grained recognition gradually shifts from
    traditional multistage frameworks to an end-to-end fashion with convolutional
    neural network (CNN). Many previous end-to-end deep approaches typically
    consist of a recognition network and an auxiliary localization network trained
    with additional part annotations to detect semantic parts shared across
    classes. In this paper, without the cost of extra semantic part annotations, we
    advance by learning class-specific discriminative patches within the CNN
    framework. We achieve this by designing a novel asymmetric two-stream network
    architecture with supervision on convolutional filters and a non-random way of
    layer initialization. Experimental results show that our approach is able to
    find high-quality discriminative patches as expected and gets comparable
    results to state-of-the-art on two publicly available fine-grained recognition
    datasets.

    Effective Quantization Methods for Recurrent Neural Networks

    Qinyao He, He Wen, Shuchang Zhou, Yuxin Wu, Cong Yao, Xinyu Zhou, Yuheng Zou
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Reducing bit-widths of weights, activations, and gradients of a Neural
    Network can shrink its storage size and memory usage, and also allow for faster
    training and inference by exploiting bitwise operations. However, previous
    attempts for quantization of RNNs show considerable performance degradation
    when using low bit-width weights and activations. In this paper, we propose
    methods to quantize the structure of gates and interlinks in LSTM and GRU
    cells. In addition, we propose balanced quantization methods for weights to
    further reduce performance degradation. Experiments on PTB and IMDB datasets
    confirm effectiveness of our methods as performances of our models match or
    surpass the previous state-of-the-art of quantized RNN.

    Predicting the Category and Attributes of Mental Pictures Using Deep Gaze Pooling

    Hosnieh Sattar, Andreas Bulling, Mario Fritz
    Subjects: Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Previous work focused on predicting visual search targets from human
    fixations but, in the real world, a specific target is often not known, e.g.
    when searching for a present for a friend. In this work we instead study the
    problem of predicting the mental picture, i.e. only an abstract idea instead of
    a specific target. This task is significantly more challenging given that
    mental pictures of the same target category can vary widely depending on
    personal biases, and given that characteristic target attributes can often not
    be verbalised explicitly. We instead propose to use gaze information as
    implicit information on users’ mental picture and present a novel gaze pooling
    layer to seamlessly integrate semantic and localized fixation information into
    a deep image representation. We show that we can robustly predict both the
    mental picture’s category as well as attributes on a novel dataset containing
    fixation data of 14 users searching for targets on a subset of the DeepFahion
    dataset. Our results have important implications for future search interfaces
    and suggest deep gaze pooling as a general-purpose approach for gaze-supported
    computer vision systems.

    Machine Learning for Dental Image Analysis

    Young-jun Yu
    Comments: This study was reviewed and approved by the institutional review board of the Pusan National University Dental Hospital (PNUPH-2015-034)
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    In order to study the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to dental
    imaging, we applied AI technology to classify a set of panoramic radiographs
    using (a) a convolutional neural network (CNN) which is a form of an artificial
    neural network (ANN), (b) representative image cognition algorithms that
    implement scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), and (c) histogram of
    oriented gradients (HOG).

    Photographic home styles in Congress: a computer vision approach

    L. Jason Anastasopoulos, Dhruvil Badani, Crystal Lee, Shiry Ginosar, Jake Williams
    Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    While members of Congress now routinely communicate with constituents using
    images on a variety of internet platforms, little is known about how images are
    used as a means of strategic political communication. This is due primarily to
    computational limitations which have prevented large-scale, systematic analyses
    of image features. New developments in computer vision, however, are bringing
    the systematic study of images within reach. Here, we develop a framework for
    understanding visual political communication by extending Fenno’s analysis of
    home style (Fenno 1978) to images and introduce “photographic” home styles.
    Using approximately 192,000 photographs collected from MCs Facebook profiles,
    we build machine learning software with convolutional neural networks and
    conduct an image manipulation experiment to explore how the race of people that
    MCs pose with shape photographic home styles. We find evidence that electoral
    pressures shape photographic home styles and demonstrate that Democratic and
    Republican members of Congress use images in very different ways.


    Artificial Intelligence

    Fusion of EEG and Musical Features in Continuous Music-emotion Recognition

    Nattapong Thammasan, Ken-ichi Fukui, Masayuki Numao
    Comments: The short version of this paper is accepted to appear as an abstract in the proceedings of AAAI-17 (student abstract and poster program)
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

    Emotion estimation in music listening is confronting challenges to capture
    the emotion variation of listeners. Recent years have witnessed attempts to
    exploit multimodality fusing information from musical contents and
    physiological signals captured from listeners to improve the performance of
    emotion recognition. In this paper, we present a study of fusion of signals of
    electroencephalogram (EEG), a tool to capture brainwaves at a high-temporal
    resolution, and musical features at decision level in recognizing the
    time-varying binary classes of arousal and valence. Our empirical results
    showed that the fusion could outperform the performance of emotion recognition
    using only EEG modality that was suffered from inter-subject variability, and
    this suggested the promise of multimodal fusion in improving the accuracy of
    music-emotion recognition.

    System-Generated Requests for Rewriting Proposals

    Pietro Speroni di Fenizio, Cyril Velikanov
    Comments: 9 pages, 1 figure, presented at e-Part 2011 conference
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)

    We present an online deliberation system using mutual evaluation in order to
    collaboratively develop solutions. Participants submit their proposals and
    evaluate each other’s proposals; some of them may then be invited by the system
    to rewrite ‘problematic’ proposals. Two cases are discussed: a proposal
    supported by many, but not by a given person, who is then invited to rewrite it
    for making yet more acceptable; and a poorly presented but presumably
    interesting proposal. The first of these cases has been successfully
    implemented. Proposals are evaluated along two axes-understandability (or
    clarity, or, more generally, quality), and agreement. The latter is used by the
    system to cluster proposals according to their ideas, while the former is used
    both to present the best proposals on top of their clusters, and to find poorly
    written proposals candidates for rewriting. These functionalities may be
    considered as important components of a large scale online deliberation system.

    t-Exponential Triplet Embedding

    Ehsan Amid, Nikos Vlassis, Manfred K. Warmuth
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    Given a set of relative similarities between objects in the form of triplets
    “object i is more similar to object j than to object k”, we consider the
    problem of finding an embedding of these objects in a metric space. This
    problem is generally referred to as triplet embedding. Our main focus in this
    paper is the case where a subset of triplets are corrupted by noise, such that
    the order of objects in a triple is reversed. In a crowdsourcing application,
    for instance, this noise may arise due to varying skill levels or different
    opinions of the human evaluators. As we show, all existing triplet embedding
    methods fail to handle even low levels of noise. Inspired by recent advances in
    robust binary classification and ranking, we introduce a new technique, called
    t-Exponential Triplet Embedding (t-ETE), that produces high-quality embeddings
    even in the presence of significant amount of noise in the triplets. By an
    extensive set of experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we show
    that our method outperforms all the other methods, giving rise to new insights
    on real-world data, which have been impossible to observe using the previous
    techniques.

    Contextualizing Geometric Data Analysis and Related Data Analytics: A Virtual Microscope for Big Data Analytics

    Fionn Murtagh, Mohsen Farid
    Comments: 19 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    An objective of this work is to contextualize the analysis of large and
    multi-faceted data sources. Consider for example, health research in the
    context of social characteristics. Also there may be social research in the
    context of health characteristics. Related to this can be requirements for
    contextualizing Big Data analytics. A major challenge in Big Data analytics is
    the bias due to self selection. In general, and in practical settings, the aim
    is to determine the most revealing coupling of mainstream data and context.
    This is technically processed in Correspondence Analysis through use of the
    main and the supplementary data elements, i.e., individuals or objects,
    attributes and modalities.

    Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Reinforcement Learning

    Irwan Bello, Hieu Pham, Quoc V. Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Samy Bengio
    Comments: Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2017
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    This paper presents a framework to tackle combinatorial optimization problems
    using neural networks and reinforcement learning. We focus on the traveling
    salesman problem (TSP) and train a recurrent network that, given a set of city
    coordinates, predicts a distribution over different city permutations. Using
    negative tour length as the reward signal, we optimize the parameters of the
    recurrent network using a policy gradient method. We compare learning the
    network parameters on a set of training graphs against learning them on
    individual test graphs. The best results are obtained when the network is first
    optimized on a training set and then refined on individual test graphs. Without
    any supervision and with minimal engineering, Neural Combinatorial Optimization
    achieves close to optimal results on 2D Euclidean graphs with up to 100 nodes.

    C-RNN-GAN: Continuous recurrent neural networks with adversarial training

    Olof Mogren
    Comments: Accepted to Constructive Machine Learning Workshop (CML) at NIPS 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, December 10
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Generative adversarial networks have been proposed as a way of efficiently
    training deep generative neural networks. We propose a generative adversarial
    model that works on continuous sequential data, and apply it by training it on
    a collection of classical music. We conclude that it generates music that
    sounds better and better as the model is trained, report statistics on
    generated music, and let the reader judge the quality by downloading the
    generated songs.

    Exploration for Multi-task Reinforcement Learning with Deep Generative Models

    Sai Praveen Bangaru, JS Suhas, Balaraman Ravindran
    Comments: 9 pages, 5 figures; NIPS Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop 2016, Barcelona
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Exploration in multi-task reinforcement learning is critical in training
    agents to deduce the underlying MDP. Many of the existing exploration
    frameworks such as (E^3), (R_{max}), Thompson sampling assume a single
    stationary MDP and are not suitable for system identification in the multi-task
    setting. We present a novel method to facilitate exploration in multi-task
    reinforcement learning using deep generative models. We supplement our method
    with a low dimensional energy model to learn the underlying MDP distribution
    and provide a resilient and adaptive exploration signal to the agent. We
    evaluate our method on a new set of environments and provide intuitive
    interpretation of our results.

    Joint Causal Inference on Observational and Experimental Datasets

    Sara Magliacane, Tom Claassen, Joris M. Mooij
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We introduce Joint Causal Inference (JCI), a powerful formulation of causal
    discovery over multiple datasets that allows to jointly learn both the causal
    structure and targets of interventions from statistical independences in pooled
    data. Compared with existing constraint-based approaches for causal discovery
    from multiple data sets, JCI offers several advantages: it allows for several
    different types of interventions, it can learn intervention targets, it
    systematically pools data across different datasets which improves the
    statistical power of independence tests, and it improves on the accuracy and
    identifiability of the predicted causal relations. A technical complication
    that arises in JCI are the occurrence of faithfulness violations due to
    deterministic relations. We propose a simple but effective strategy for dealing
    with this type of faithfulness violations. We implement it in ACID, a
    determinism-tolerant extension of Ancestral Causal Inference (ACI) (Magliacane
    et al., 2016), a recently proposed logic-based causal discovery method that
    improves reliability of the output by exploiting redundant information in the
    data. We illustrate the benefits of JCI with ACID with an evaluation on a
    simulated dataset.

    The observer-assisted method for adjusting hyper-parameters in deep learning algorithms

    Maciej Wielgosz
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    This paper presents a concept of a novel method for adjusting
    hyper-parameters in Deep Learning (DL) algorithms. An external agent-observer
    monitors a performance of a selected Deep Learning algorithm. The observer
    learns to model the DL algorithm using a series of random experiments.
    Consequently, it may be used for predicting a response of the DL algorithm in
    terms of a selected quality measurement to a set of hyper-parameters. This
    allows to construct an ensemble composed of a series of evaluators which
    constitute an observer-assisted architecture. The architecture may be used to
    gradually iterate towards to the best achievable quality score in tiny steps
    governed by a unit of progress. The algorithm is stopped when the maximum
    number of steps is reached or no further progress is made.

    SeDMiD for Confusion Detection: Uncovering Mind State from Time Series Brain Wave Data

    Jingkang Yang, Haohan Wang, Jun Zhu, Eric P. Xing
    Comments: 11 pages, 2 figures, NIPS 2016 Time Series Workshop
    Subjects: Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Understanding how brain functions has been an intriguing topic for years.
    With the recent progress on collecting massive data and developing advanced
    technology, people have become interested in addressing the challenge of
    decoding brain wave data into meaningful mind states, with many machine
    learning models and algorithms being revisited and developed, especially the
    ones that handle time series data because of the nature of brain waves.
    However, many of these time series models, like HMM with hidden state in
    discrete space or State Space Model with hidden state in continuous space, only
    work with one source of data and cannot handle different sources of information
    simultaneously. In this paper, we propose an extension of State Space Model to
    work with different sources of information together with its learning and
    inference algorithms. We apply this model to decode the mind state of students
    during lectures based on their brain waves and reach a significant better
    results compared to traditional methods.

    Unit Commitment using Nearest Neighbor as a Short-Term Proxy

    Gal Dalal, Elad Gilboa, Shie Mannor, Louis Wehenkel
    Comments: Package contains both original article, and its supplementary material, in two separate files
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    We devise the Unit Commitment Nearest Neighbor (UCNN) algorithm to be used as
    a proxy for quickly approximating outcomes of short-term decisions, to make
    tractable hierarchical long-term assessment and planning for large power
    systems. Experimental results on an updated version of IEEE-RTS96 show high
    accuracy measured on operational cost, achieved in run-times that are lower in
    several orders of magnitude than the traditional approach.

    Choquet integral in decision analysis – lessons from the axiomatization

    Mikhail Timonin
    Subjects: Economics (q-fin.EC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    The Choquet integral is a powerful aggregation operator which lists many
    well-known models as its special cases. We look at these special cases and
    provide their axiomatic analysis. In cases where an axiomatization has been
    previously given in the literature, we connect the existing results with the
    framework that we have developed. Next we turn to the question of learning,
    which is especially important for the practical applications of the model. So
    far, learning of the Choquet integral has been mostly confined to the learning
    of the capacity. Such an approach requires making a powerful assumption that
    all dimensions (e.g. criteria) are evaluated on the same scale, which is rarely
    justified in practice. Too often categorical data is given arbitrary numerical
    labels (e.g. AHP), and numerical data is considered cardinally and ordinally
    commensurate, sometimes after a simple normalization. Such approaches clearly
    lack scientific rigour, and yet they are commonly seen in all kinds of
    applications. We discuss the pros and cons of making such an assumption and
    look at the consequences which axiomatization uniqueness results have for the
    learning problems. Finally, we review some of the applications of the Choquet
    integral in decision analysis. Apart from MCDA, which is the main area of
    interest for our results, we also discuss how the model can be interpreted in
    the social choice context. We look in detail at the state-dependent utility,
    and show how comonotonicity, central to the previous axiomatizations, actually
    implies state-independency in the Choquet integral model. We also discuss the
    conditions required to have a meaningful state-dependent utility representation
    and show the novelty of our results compared to the previous methods of
    building state-dependent models.

    Capacity and Trainability in Recurrent Neural Networks

    Jasmine Collins, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, David Sussillo
    Comments: Submitted to ICLR 2017
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Two potential bottlenecks on the expressiveness of recurrent neural networks
    (RNNs) are their ability to store information about the task in their
    parameters, and to store information about the input history in their units. We
    show experimentally that all common RNN architectures achieve nearly the same
    per-task and per-unit capacity bounds with careful training, for a variety of
    tasks and stacking depths. They can store an amount of task information which
    is linear in the number of parameters, and is approximately 5 bits per
    parameter. They can additionally store approximately one real number from their
    input history per hidden unit. We further find that for several tasks it is the
    per-task parameter capacity bound that determines performance. These results
    suggest that many previous results comparing RNN architectures are driven
    primarily by differences in training effectiveness, rather than differences in
    capacity. Supporting this observation, we compare training difficulty for
    several architectures, and show that vanilla RNNs are far more difficult to
    train, yet have higher capacity. Finally, we propose two novel RNN
    architectures, one of which is easier to train than the LSTM or GRU.


    Information Retrieval

    Assessing pattern recognition or labeling in streams of temporal data

    Pierre-François Marteau (EXPRESSION)
    Journal-ref: 2nd ECML/PKDD Workshop on Advanced Analytics and Learning on
    Temporal Data, Sep 2016, Riva del Garda, Italy. 2016
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    In the data deluge context, pattern recognition or labeling in streams is
    becoming quite an essential and pressing task as data flows inside always
    bigger streams. The assessment of such tasks is not so easy when dealing with
    temporal data, namely patterns that have a duration (a beginning and an end
    time-stamp). This paper details an approach based on an editing distance to
    first align a sequence of labeled temporal segments with a ground truth
    sequence, and then, by back-tracing an optimal alignment path, to provide a
    confusion matrix at the label level. From this confusion matrix, standard
    evaluation measures can easily be derived as well as other measures such as the
    “latency” that can be quite important in (early) pattern detection
    applications.

    Anchored Correlation Explanation: Topic Modeling with Minimal Domain Knowledge

    Ryan J. Gallagher, Kyle Reing, David Kale, Greg Ver Steeg
    Comments: 17 pages, 5 figures
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Information Theory (cs.IT); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Popular approaches to topic modeling often invoke the use of probabilistic
    generative models, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). While such models
    have enjoyed widespread use and proven fruitful, these models or generalizing
    them to incorporate human input requires detailed and often unrealistic
    assumptions about the data generating process. We introduce a new approach to
    topic modeling via Correlation Explanation (CorEx), which leverages an
    information-theoretic framework to bypass typical topic modeling assumptions.
    Using two challenging, real-world datasets, we demonstrate that CorEx yields
    results that are comparable to LDA in terms of semantic coherence and document
    classification. We then devise a flexible methodology for incorporating
    word-level domain knowledge into CorEx by introducing anchor words in a manner
    reminiscent of the information bottleneck. Augmenting CorEx with anchor words
    allows the topic model to be guided with minimal human intervention towards
    topics that do not naturally emerge. Furthermore, we show that these new topics
    are often highly coherent and act as better predictors in document
    classification.

    Less is More: Learning Prominent and Diverse Topics for Data Summarization

    Jian Tang, Ming Zhang, Qiaozhu Mei
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Statistical topic models efficiently facilitate the exploration of
    large-scale data sets. Many models have been developed and broadly used to
    summarize the semantic structure in news, science, social media, and digital
    humanities. However, a common and practical objective in data exploration tasks
    is not to enumerate all existing topics, but to quickly extract representative
    ones that broadly cover the content of the corpus, i.e., a few topics that
    serve as a good summary of the data. Most existing topic models fit exactly the
    same number of topics as a user specifies, which have imposed an unnecessary
    burden to the users who have limited prior knowledge. We instead propose new
    models that are able to learn fewer but more representative topics for the
    purpose of data summarization. We propose a reinforced random walk that allows
    prominent topics to absorb tokens from similar and smaller topics, thus
    enhances the diversity among the top topics extracted. With this reinforced
    random walk as a general process embedded in classical topic models, we obtain
    extit{diverse topic models} that are able to extract the most prominent and
    diverse topics from data. The inference procedures of these diverse topic
    models remain as simple and efficient as the classical models. Experimental
    results demonstrate that the diverse topic models not only discover topics that
    better summarize the data, but also require minimal prior knowledge of the
    users.


    Computation and Language

    Anchored Correlation Explanation: Topic Modeling with Minimal Domain Knowledge

    Ryan J. Gallagher, Kyle Reing, David Kale, Greg Ver Steeg
    Comments: 17 pages, 5 figures
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Information Theory (cs.IT); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Popular approaches to topic modeling often invoke the use of probabilistic
    generative models, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). While such models
    have enjoyed widespread use and proven fruitful, these models or generalizing
    them to incorporate human input requires detailed and often unrealistic
    assumptions about the data generating process. We introduce a new approach to
    topic modeling via Correlation Explanation (CorEx), which leverages an
    information-theoretic framework to bypass typical topic modeling assumptions.
    Using two challenging, real-world datasets, we demonstrate that CorEx yields
    results that are comparable to LDA in terms of semantic coherence and document
    classification. We then devise a flexible methodology for incorporating
    word-level domain knowledge into CorEx by introducing anchor words in a manner
    reminiscent of the information bottleneck. Augmenting CorEx with anchor words
    allows the topic model to be guided with minimal human intervention towards
    topics that do not naturally emerge. Furthermore, we show that these new topics
    are often highly coherent and act as better predictors in document
    classification.

    Deep encoding of etymological information in TEI

    Jack Bowers (OEAW), Laurent Romary (CMB, ALPAGE)
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    This paper aims to provide a comprehensive modeling and representation of
    etymological data in digital dictionaries. The purpose is to integrate in one
    coherent framework both digital representations of legacy dictionaries, and
    also born-digital lexical databases that are constructed manually or
    semi-automatically. We want to propose a systematic and coherent set of
    modeling principles for a variety of etymological phenomena that may contribute
    to the creation of a continuum between existing and future lexical constructs,
    where anyone interested in tracing the history of words and their meanings will
    be able to seamlessly query lexical resources.Instead of designing an ad hoc
    model and representation language for digital etymological data, we will focus
    on identifying all the possibilities offered by the TEI guidelines for the
    representation of lexical information.

    Towards Accurate Word Segmentation for Chinese Patents

    Si Li, Nianwen Xue
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    A patent is a property right for an invention granted by the government to
    the inventor. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem.
    So patents often have a high concentration of scientific and technical terms
    that are rare in everyday language. The Chinese word segmentation model trained
    on currently available everyday language data sets performs poorly because it
    cannot effectively recognize these scientific and technical terms. In this
    paper we describe a pragmatic approach to Chinese word segmentation on patents
    where we train a character-based semi-supervised sequence labeling model by
    extracting features from a manually segmented corpus of 142 patents, enhanced
    with information extracted from the Chinese TreeBank. Experiments show that the
    accuracy of our model reached 95.08% (F1 score) on a held-out test set and
    96.59% on development set, compared with an F1 score of 91.48% on development
    set if the model is trained on the Chinese TreeBank. We also experimented with
    some existing domain adaptation techniques, the results show that the amount of
    target domain data and the selected features impact the performance of the
    domain adaptation techniques.

    Context-aware Natural Language Generation with Recurrent Neural Networks

    Jian Tang, Yifan Yang, Sam Carton, Ming Zhang, Qiaozhu Mei
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    This paper studied generating natural languages at particular contexts or
    situations. We proposed two novel approaches which encode the contexts into a
    continuous semantic representation and then decode the semantic representation
    into text sequences with recurrent neural networks. During decoding, the
    context information are attended through a gating mechanism, addressing the
    problem of long-range dependency caused by lengthy sequences. We evaluate the
    effectiveness of the proposed approaches on user review data, in which rich
    contexts are available and two informative contexts, sentiments and products,
    are selected for evaluation. Experiments show that the fake reviews generated
    by our approaches are very natural. Results of fake review detection with human
    judges show that more than 50\% of the fake reviews are misclassified as the
    real reviews, and more than 90\% are misclassified by existing state-of-the-art
    fake review detection algorithm.

    Less is More: Learning Prominent and Diverse Topics for Data Summarization

    Jian Tang, Ming Zhang, Qiaozhu Mei
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Statistical topic models efficiently facilitate the exploration of
    large-scale data sets. Many models have been developed and broadly used to
    summarize the semantic structure in news, science, social media, and digital
    humanities. However, a common and practical objective in data exploration tasks
    is not to enumerate all existing topics, but to quickly extract representative
    ones that broadly cover the content of the corpus, i.e., a few topics that
    serve as a good summary of the data. Most existing topic models fit exactly the
    same number of topics as a user specifies, which have imposed an unnecessary
    burden to the users who have limited prior knowledge. We instead propose new
    models that are able to learn fewer but more representative topics for the
    purpose of data summarization. We propose a reinforced random walk that allows
    prominent topics to absorb tokens from similar and smaller topics, thus
    enhances the diversity among the top topics extracted. With this reinforced
    random walk as a general process embedded in classical topic models, we obtain
    extit{diverse topic models} that are able to extract the most prominent and
    diverse topics from data. The inference procedures of these diverse topic
    models remain as simple and efficient as the classical models. Experimental
    results demonstrate that the diverse topic models not only discover topics that
    better summarize the data, but also require minimal prior knowledge of the
    users.


    Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

    SLA Violation Prediction In Cloud Computing: A Machine Learning Perspective

    Reyhane Askari Hemmat, Abdelhakim Hafid
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Learning (cs.LG)

    Service level agreement (SLA) is an essential part of cloud systems to ensure
    maximum availability of services for customers. With a violation of SLA, the
    provider has to pay penalties. In this paper, we explore two machine learning
    models: Naive Bayes and Random Forest Classifiers to predict SLA violations.
    Since SLA violations are a rare event in the real world (~0.2 %), the
    classification task becomes more challenging. In order to overcome these
    challenges, we use several re-sampling methods. We find that random forests
    with SMOTE-ENN re-sampling have the best performance among other methods with
    the accuracy of 99.88 % and F_1 score of 0.9980.

    RenderSelect: a Cloud Broker Framework for Cloud Renderfarm Services

    Annette J Ruby, Banu W Aisha, Chandran P Subash
    Comments: 13 pages, 10 figures
    Journal-ref: International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ,Vol.10,
    No.20 ,2015
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    In the 3D studios the animation scene files undergo a process called as
    rendering, where the 3D wire frame models are converted into 3D photorealistic
    images. As the rendering process is both a computationally intensive and a time
    consuming task, the cloud services based rendering in cloud render farms is
    gaining popularity among the animators. Though cloud render farms offer many
    benefits, the animators hesitate to move from their traditional offline
    rendering to cloud services based render farms as they lack the knowledge,
    expertise and the time to compare the render farm service providers based on
    the Quality of Service (QoS) offered by them, negotiate the QoS and monitor
    whether the agreed upon QoS is actually offered by the renderfarm service
    providers. In this paper we propose a Cloud Service Broker (CSB) framework
    called the RenderSelect that helps in the dynamic ranking, selection,
    negotiation and monitoring of the cloud based render farm services. The cloud
    services based renderfarms are ranked and selected services based on multi
    criteria QoS requirements. Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), the popular
    Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method is used for ranking and selecting
    the cloud services based renderfarms. The AHP method of ranking is illustrated
    in detail with an example. It could be verified that AHP method ranks the cloud
    services effectively with less time and complexity.

    Comparison of Multi Criteria Decision Making Algorithms for Ranking Cloud Renderfarm Services

    Annette J Ruby, Banu W Aisha, Chandran P Subash
    Comments: 5 pages
    Journal-ref: Indian Journal of Science and Technology, Vol. 9, No.31, 2016
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Cloud services that provide a complete environment for the animators to
    render their files using the resources in the cloud are called Cloud Renderfarm
    Services. The objective of this work is to rank and compare the performance of
    these services using two popular Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM)
    Algorithms namely the Analytical Hierarchical Processing (AHP) and SAW (Simple
    Additive Weighting) methods. The performance of three real time cloud
    renderfarm services are ranked and compared based on five Quality of Service
    (QoS) attributes that are important to these services namely the Render Node
    Cost, File Upload Time, Availability, Elasticity and Service Response Time. The
    performance of these cloud renderfarm services are ranked in four different
    simulations by varying the weights assigned for each QoS attribute and the
    ranking obtained are compared. The results show that AHP and SAW assigned
    similar ranks to all three cloud renderfarm services for all simulations.

    Stateless Computation

    Danny Dolev, Michael Erdmann, Neil Lutz, Michael Schapira, Adva Zair
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    We present and explore a model of stateless and self-stabilizing distributed
    computation, inspired by real-world applications such as routing on today’s
    Internet. Processors in our model do not have an internal state, but rather
    interact by repeatedly mapping incoming messages (“labels”) to outgoing
    messages and output values. While seemingly too restrictive to be of interest,
    stateless computation encompasses both classical game-theoretic notions of
    strategic interaction and a broad range of practical applications (e.g.,
    Internet protocols, circuits, diffusion of technologies in social networks). We
    embark on a holistic exploration of stateless computation. We tackle two
    important questions: (1) Under what conditions is self-stabilization, i.e.,
    guaranteed “convergence” to a “legitimate” global configuration, achievable for
    stateless computation? and (2) What is the computational power of stateless
    computation? Our results for self-stabilization include a general necessary
    condition for self-stabilization and hardness results for verifying that a
    stateless protocol is self-stabilizing. Our main results for the power of
    stateless computation show that labels of logarithmic length in the number of
    processors yield substantial computational power even on ring topologies. We
    present a separation between unidirectional and bidirectional rings (L/poly vs.
    P/poly), reflecting the sequential nature of computation on a unidirectional
    ring, as opposed to the parallelism afforded by the bidirectional ring. We
    leave the reader with many exciting directions for future research.

    Performance Tuning of Hadoop MapReduce: A Noisy Gradient Approach

    Sandeep Kumar, Sindhu Padakandla, Chandrashekar L, Priyank Parihar, K Gopinath, Shalabh Bhatnagar
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Learning (cs.LG)

    Hadoop MapReduce is a framework for distributed storage and processing of
    large datasets that is quite popular in big data analytics. It has various
    configuration parameters (knobs) which play an important role in deciding the
    performance i.e., the execution time of a given big data processing job.
    Default values of these parameters do not always result in good performance and
    hence it is important to tune them. However, there is inherent difficulty in
    tuning the parameters due to two important reasons – firstly, the parameter
    search space is large and secondly, there are cross-parameter interactions.
    Hence, there is a need for a dimensionality-free method which can automatically
    tune the configuration parameters by taking into account the cross-parameter
    dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel Hadoop parameter tuning
    methodology, based on a noisy gradient algorithm known as the simultaneous
    perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA). The SPSA algorithm tunes the
    parameters by directly observing the performance of the Hadoop MapReduce
    system. The approach followed is independent of parameter dimensions and
    requires only (2) observations per iteration while tuning. We demonstrate the
    effectiveness of our methodology in achieving good performance on popular
    Hadoop benchmarks namely emph{Grep}, emph{Bigram}, emph{Inverted Index},
    emph{Word Co-occurrence} and emph{Terasort}. Our method, when tested on a 25
    node Hadoop cluster shows 66\% decrease in execution time of Hadoop jobs on an
    average, when compared to the default configuration. Further, we also observe a
    reduction of 45\% in execution times, when compared to prior methods.

    Proposal of Real Time Predictive Maintenance Platform with 3D Printer for Business Vehicles

    Yoji Yamato, Yoshifumi Fukumoto, Hiroki Kumazaki
    Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures, 5th International Conference on Software and Information Engineering (ICSIE 2016), May 2016
    Journal-ref: 5th International Conference on Software and Information
    Engineering (ICSIE 2016), pp.6-10, May 2016
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    This paper proposes a maintenance platform for business vehicles which
    detects failure sign using IoT data on the move, orders to create repair parts
    by 3D printers and to deliver them to the destination. Recently, IoT and 3D
    printer technologies have been progressed and application cases to
    manufacturing and maintenance have been increased. Especially in air flight
    industry, various sensing data are collected during flight by IoT technologies
    and parts are created by 3D printers. And IoT platforms which improve
    development/operation of IoT applications also have been appeared. However,
    existing IoT platforms mainly targets to visualize “things” statuses by batch
    processing of collected sensing data, and 3 factors of real-time, automatic
    orders of repair parts and parts stock cost are insufficient to accelerate
    businesses. This paper targets maintenance of business vehicles such as
    airplane or high-speed bus. We propose a maintenance platform with real-time
    analysis, automatic orders of repair parts and minimum stock cost of parts. The
    proposed platform collects data via closed VPN, analyzes stream data and
    predicts failures in real-time by online machine learning framework Jubatus,
    coordinates ERP or SCM via in memory DB to order repair parts and also
    distributes repair parts data to 3D printers to create repair parts near the
    destination.


    Learning

    Joint Causal Inference on Observational and Experimental Datasets

    Sara Magliacane, Tom Claassen, Joris M. Mooij
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We introduce Joint Causal Inference (JCI), a powerful formulation of causal
    discovery over multiple datasets that allows to jointly learn both the causal
    structure and targets of interventions from statistical independences in pooled
    data. Compared with existing constraint-based approaches for causal discovery
    from multiple data sets, JCI offers several advantages: it allows for several
    different types of interventions, it can learn intervention targets, it
    systematically pools data across different datasets which improves the
    statistical power of independence tests, and it improves on the accuracy and
    identifiability of the predicted causal relations. A technical complication
    that arises in JCI are the occurrence of faithfulness violations due to
    deterministic relations. We propose a simple but effective strategy for dealing
    with this type of faithfulness violations. We implement it in ACID, a
    determinism-tolerant extension of Ancestral Causal Inference (ACI) (Magliacane
    et al., 2016), a recently proposed logic-based causal discovery method that
    improves reliability of the output by exploiting redundant information in the
    data. We illustrate the benefits of JCI with ACID with an evaluation on a
    simulated dataset.

    The observer-assisted method for adjusting hyper-parameters in deep learning algorithms

    Maciej Wielgosz
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    This paper presents a concept of a novel method for adjusting
    hyper-parameters in Deep Learning (DL) algorithms. An external agent-observer
    monitors a performance of a selected Deep Learning algorithm. The observer
    learns to model the DL algorithm using a series of random experiments.
    Consequently, it may be used for predicting a response of the DL algorithm in
    terms of a selected quality measurement to a set of hyper-parameters. This
    allows to construct an ensemble composed of a series of evaluators which
    constitute an observer-assisted architecture. The architecture may be used to
    gradually iterate towards to the best achievable quality score in tiny steps
    governed by a unit of progress. The algorithm is stopped when the maximum
    number of steps is reached or no further progress is made.

    Weighted bandits or: How bandits learn distorted values that are not expected

    Aditya Gopalan, L.A. Prashanth, Michael Fu, Steve Marcus
    Comments: Longer version of the paper to be published as part of the proceedings of AAAI 2017
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly
    observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate
    two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the
    cost distributions: the classic (K)-armed bandit and the linearly parameterized
    bandit. In both settings, we propose algorithms that are inspired by Upper
    Confidence Bound (UCB), incorporate cost distortions, and exhibit sublinear
    regret assuming holder continuous weight distortion functions. For the
    (K)-armed setting, we show that the algorithm, called W-UCB, achieves
    problem-dependent regret (O(L^2 M^2 log n/ Delta^{frac{2}{alpha}-1})),
    where (n) is the number of plays, (Delta) is the gap in distorted expected
    value between the best and next best arm, (L) and (alpha) are the H”{o}lder
    constants for the distortion function, and (M) is an upper bound on costs, and
    a problem-independent regret bound of
    (O((KL^2M^2)^{alpha/2}n^{(2-alpha)/2})). We also present a matching lower
    bound on the regret, showing that the regret of W-UCB is essentially
    unimprovable over the class of H”{o}lder-continuous weight distortions. For
    the linearly parameterized setting, we develop a new algorithm, a variant of
    the Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit (OFUL) algorithm called
    WOFUL (Weight-distorted OFUL), and show that it has regret (O(dsqrt{n} ;
    mbox{polylog}(n))) with high probability, for sub-Gaussian cost distributions.
    Finally, numerical examples demonstrate the advantages resulting from using
    distortion-aware learning algorithms.

    Reliably Learning the ReLU in Polynomial Time

    Surbhi Goel, Varun Kanade, Adam Klivans, Justin Thaler
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We give the first dimension-efficient algorithms for learning Rectified
    Linear Units (ReLUs), which are functions of the form (mathbf{x} mapsto
    max(0, mathbf{w} cdot mathbf{x})) with (mathbf{w} in mathbb{S}^{n-1}).
    Our algorithm works in the challenging Reliable Agnostic learning model of
    Kalai, Kanade, and Mansour (2009) where the learner is given access to a
    distribution (cal{D}) on labeled examples but the labeling may be arbitrary.
    We construct a hypothesis that simultaneously minimizes the false-positive rate
    and the loss on inputs given positive labels by (cal{D}), for any convex,
    bounded, and Lipschitz loss function.

    The algorithm runs in polynomial-time (in (n)) with respect to any
    distribution on (mathbb{S}^{n-1}) (the unit sphere in (n) dimensions) and for
    any error parameter (epsilon = Omega(1/log n)) (this yields a PTAS for a
    question raised by F. Bach on the complexity of maximizing ReLUs). These
    results are in contrast to known efficient algorithms for reliably learning
    linear threshold functions, where (epsilon) must be (Omega(1)) and strong
    assumptions are required on the marginal distribution. We can compose our
    results to obtain the first set of efficient algorithms for learning
    constant-depth networks of ReLUs.

    Our techniques combine kernel methods and polynomial approximations with a
    “dual-loss” approach to convex programming. As a byproduct we obtain a number
    of applications including the first set of efficient algorithms for “convex
    piecewise-linear fitting” and the first efficient algorithms for noisy
    polynomial reconstruction of low-weight polynomials on the unit sphere.

    Behavior-Based Machine-Learning: A Hybrid Approach for Predicting Human Decision Making

    Gali Noti, Effi Levi, Yoav Kolumbus, Amit Daniely
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT)

    A large body of work in behavioral fields attempts to develop models that
    describe the way people, as opposed to rational agents, make decisions. A
    recent Choice Prediction Competition (2015) challenged researchers to suggest a
    model that captures 14 classic choice biases and can predict human decisions
    under risk and ambiguity. The competition focused on simple decision problems,
    in which human subjects were asked to repeatedly choose between two gamble
    options.

    In this paper we present our approach for predicting human decision behavior:
    we suggest to use machine learning algorithms with features that are based on
    well-established behavioral theories. The basic idea is that these
    psychological features are essential for the representation of the data and are
    important for the success of the learning process. We implement a vanilla model
    in which we train SVM models using behavioral features that rely on the
    psychological properties underlying the competition baseline model. We show
    that this basic model captures the 14 choice biases and outperforms all the
    other learning-based models in the competition. The preliminary results suggest
    that such hybrid models can significantly improve the prediction of human
    decision making, and are a promising direction for future research.

    Unit Commitment using Nearest Neighbor as a Short-Term Proxy

    Gal Dalal, Elad Gilboa, Shie Mannor, Louis Wehenkel
    Comments: Package contains both original article, and its supplementary material, in two separate files
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    We devise the Unit Commitment Nearest Neighbor (UCNN) algorithm to be used as
    a proxy for quickly approximating outcomes of short-term decisions, to make
    tractable hierarchical long-term assessment and planning for large power
    systems. Experimental results on an updated version of IEEE-RTS96 show high
    accuracy measured on operational cost, achieved in run-times that are lower in
    several orders of magnitude than the traditional approach.

    Effective Quantization Methods for Recurrent Neural Networks

    Qinyao He, He Wen, Shuchang Zhou, Yuxin Wu, Cong Yao, Xinyu Zhou, Yuheng Zou
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Reducing bit-widths of weights, activations, and gradients of a Neural
    Network can shrink its storage size and memory usage, and also allow for faster
    training and inference by exploiting bitwise operations. However, previous
    attempts for quantization of RNNs show considerable performance degradation
    when using low bit-width weights and activations. In this paper, we propose
    methods to quantize the structure of gates and interlinks in LSTM and GRU
    cells. In addition, we propose balanced quantization methods for weights to
    further reduce performance degradation. Experiments on PTB and IMDB datasets
    confirm effectiveness of our methods as performances of our models match or
    surpass the previous state-of-the-art of quantized RNN.

    Active Deep Learning for Classification of Hyperspectral Images

    Peng Liu, Hui Zhang, Kie B. Eom
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    Active deep learning classification of hyperspectral images is considered in
    this paper. Deep learning has achieved success in many applications, but
    good-quality labeled samples are needed to construct a deep learning network.
    It is expensive getting good labeled samples in hyperspectral images for remote
    sensing applications. An active learning algorithm based on a weighted
    incremental dictionary learning is proposed for such applications. The proposed
    algorithm selects training samples that maximize two selection criteria, namely
    representative and uncertainty. This algorithm trains a deep network
    efficiently by actively selecting training samples at each iteration. The
    proposed algorithm is applied for the classification of hyperspectral images,
    and compared with other classification algorithms employing active learning. It
    is shown that the proposed algorithm is efficient and effective in classifying
    hyperspectral images.

    Less is More: Learning Prominent and Diverse Topics for Data Summarization

    Jian Tang, Ming Zhang, Qiaozhu Mei
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Statistical topic models efficiently facilitate the exploration of
    large-scale data sets. Many models have been developed and broadly used to
    summarize the semantic structure in news, science, social media, and digital
    humanities. However, a common and practical objective in data exploration tasks
    is not to enumerate all existing topics, but to quickly extract representative
    ones that broadly cover the content of the corpus, i.e., a few topics that
    serve as a good summary of the data. Most existing topic models fit exactly the
    same number of topics as a user specifies, which have imposed an unnecessary
    burden to the users who have limited prior knowledge. We instead propose new
    models that are able to learn fewer but more representative topics for the
    purpose of data summarization. We propose a reinforced random walk that allows
    prominent topics to absorb tokens from similar and smaller topics, thus
    enhances the diversity among the top topics extracted. With this reinforced
    random walk as a general process embedded in classical topic models, we obtain
    extit{diverse topic models} that are able to extract the most prominent and
    diverse topics from data. The inference procedures of these diverse topic
    models remain as simple and efficient as the classical models. Experimental
    results demonstrate that the diverse topic models not only discover topics that
    better summarize the data, but also require minimal prior knowledge of the
    users.

    Identity-sensitive Word Embedding through Heterogeneous Networks

    Jian Tang, Meng Qu, Qiaozhu Mei
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    Most existing word embedding approaches do not distinguish the same words in
    different contexts, therefore ignoring their contextual meanings. As a result,
    the learned embeddings of these words are usually a mixture of multiple
    meanings. In this paper, we acknowledge multiple identities of the same word in
    different contexts and learn the extbf{identity-sensitive} word embeddings.
    Based on an identity-labeled text corpora, a heterogeneous network of words and
    word identities is constructed to model different-levels of word
    co-occurrences. The heterogeneous network is further embedded into a
    low-dimensional space through a principled network embedding approach, through
    which we are able to obtain the embeddings of words and the embeddings of word
    identities. We study three different types of word identities including topics,
    sentiments and categories. Experimental results on real-world data sets show
    that the identity-sensitive word embeddings learned by our approach indeed
    capture different meanings of words and outperforms competitive methods on
    tasks including text classification and word similarity computation.

    SLA Violation Prediction In Cloud Computing: A Machine Learning Perspective

    Reyhane Askari Hemmat, Abdelhakim Hafid
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Learning (cs.LG)

    Service level agreement (SLA) is an essential part of cloud systems to ensure
    maximum availability of services for customers. With a violation of SLA, the
    provider has to pay penalties. In this paper, we explore two machine learning
    models: Naive Bayes and Random Forest Classifiers to predict SLA violations.
    Since SLA violations are a rare event in the real world (~0.2 %), the
    classification task becomes more challenging. In order to overcome these
    challenges, we use several re-sampling methods. We find that random forests
    with SMOTE-ENN re-sampling have the best performance among other methods with
    the accuracy of 99.88 % and F_1 score of 0.9980.

    Influential Node Detection in Implicit Social Networks using Multi-task Gaussian Copula Models

    Qunwei Li, Bhavya Kailkhura, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Zhenliang Zhang, Pramod K. Varshney
    Comments: NIPS 2016 Workshop, JMLR: Workshop and Conference Proceedings
    Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Influential node detection is a central research topic in social network
    analysis. Many existing methods rely on the assumption that the network
    structure is completely known extit{a priori}. However, in many applications,
    network structure is unavailable to explain the underlying information
    diffusion phenomenon. To address the challenge of information diffusion
    analysis with incomplete knowledge of network structure, we develop a
    multi-task low rank linear influence model. By exploiting the relationships
    between contagions, our approach can simultaneously predict the volume (i.e.
    time series prediction) for each contagion (or topic) and automatically
    identify the most influential nodes for each contagion. The proposed model is
    validated using synthetic data and an ISIS twitter dataset. In addition to
    improving the volume prediction performance significantly, we show that the
    proposed approach can reliably infer the most influential users for specific
    contagions.

    SeDMiD for Confusion Detection: Uncovering Mind State from Time Series Brain Wave Data

    Jingkang Yang, Haohan Wang, Jun Zhu, Eric P. Xing
    Comments: 11 pages, 2 figures, NIPS 2016 Time Series Workshop
    Subjects: Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Understanding how brain functions has been an intriguing topic for years.
    With the recent progress on collecting massive data and developing advanced
    technology, people have become interested in addressing the challenge of
    decoding brain wave data into meaningful mind states, with many machine
    learning models and algorithms being revisited and developed, especially the
    ones that handle time series data because of the nature of brain waves.
    However, many of these time series models, like HMM with hidden state in
    discrete space or State Space Model with hidden state in continuous space, only
    work with one source of data and cannot handle different sources of information
    simultaneously. In this paper, we propose an extension of State Space Model to
    work with different sources of information together with its learning and
    inference algorithms. We apply this model to decode the mind state of students
    during lectures based on their brain waves and reach a significant better
    results compared to traditional methods.

    Performance Tuning of Hadoop MapReduce: A Noisy Gradient Approach

    Sandeep Kumar, Sindhu Padakandla, Chandrashekar L, Priyank Parihar, K Gopinath, Shalabh Bhatnagar
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Learning (cs.LG)

    Hadoop MapReduce is a framework for distributed storage and processing of
    large datasets that is quite popular in big data analytics. It has various
    configuration parameters (knobs) which play an important role in deciding the
    performance i.e., the execution time of a given big data processing job.
    Default values of these parameters do not always result in good performance and
    hence it is important to tune them. However, there is inherent difficulty in
    tuning the parameters due to two important reasons – firstly, the parameter
    search space is large and secondly, there are cross-parameter interactions.
    Hence, there is a need for a dimensionality-free method which can automatically
    tune the configuration parameters by taking into account the cross-parameter
    dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel Hadoop parameter tuning
    methodology, based on a noisy gradient algorithm known as the simultaneous
    perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA). The SPSA algorithm tunes the
    parameters by directly observing the performance of the Hadoop MapReduce
    system. The approach followed is independent of parameter dimensions and
    requires only (2) observations per iteration while tuning. We demonstrate the
    effectiveness of our methodology in achieving good performance on popular
    Hadoop benchmarks namely emph{Grep}, emph{Bigram}, emph{Inverted Index},
    emph{Word Co-occurrence} and emph{Terasort}. Our method, when tested on a 25
    node Hadoop cluster shows 66\% decrease in execution time of Hadoop jobs on an
    average, when compared to the default configuration. Further, we also observe a
    reduction of 45\% in execution times, when compared to prior methods.

    Fast Supervised Discrete Hashing and its Analysis

    Gou Koutaki, Keiichiro Shirai, Mitsuru Ambai
    Comments: 12 pages
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG); Multimedia (cs.MM)

    In this paper, we propose a learning-based supervised discrete hashing
    method. Binary hashing is widely used for large-scale image retrieval as well
    as video and document searches because the compact representation of binary
    code is essential for data storage and reasonable for query searches using
    bit-operations. The recently proposed Supervised Discrete Hashing (SDH)
    efficiently solves mixed-integer programming problems by alternating
    optimization and the Discrete Cyclic Coordinate descent (DCC) method. We show
    that the SDH model can be simplified without performance degradation based on
    some preliminary experiments; we call the approximate model for this the “Fast
    SDH” (FSDH) model. We analyze the FSDH model and provide a mathematically exact
    solution for it. In contrast to SDH, our model does not require an alternating
    optimization algorithm and does not depend on initial values. FSDH is also
    easier to implement than Iterative Quantization (ITQ). Experimental results
    involving a large-scale database showed that FSDH outperforms conventional SDH
    in terms of precision, recall, and computation time.

    Machine Learning for Dental Image Analysis

    Young-jun Yu
    Comments: This study was reviewed and approved by the institutional review board of the Pusan National University Dental Hospital (PNUPH-2015-034)
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    In order to study the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to dental
    imaging, we applied AI technology to classify a set of panoramic radiographs
    using (a) a convolutional neural network (CNN) which is a form of an artificial
    neural network (ANN), (b) representative image cognition algorithms that
    implement scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), and (c) histogram of
    oriented gradients (HOG).

    Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Reinforcement Learning

    Irwan Bello, Hieu Pham, Quoc V. Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Samy Bengio
    Comments: Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2017
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    This paper presents a framework to tackle combinatorial optimization problems
    using neural networks and reinforcement learning. We focus on the traveling
    salesman problem (TSP) and train a recurrent network that, given a set of city
    coordinates, predicts a distribution over different city permutations. Using
    negative tour length as the reward signal, we optimize the parameters of the
    recurrent network using a policy gradient method. We compare learning the
    network parameters on a set of training graphs against learning them on
    individual test graphs. The best results are obtained when the network is first
    optimized on a training set and then refined on individual test graphs. Without
    any supervision and with minimal engineering, Neural Combinatorial Optimization
    achieves close to optimal results on 2D Euclidean graphs with up to 100 nodes.

    Capacity and Trainability in Recurrent Neural Networks

    Jasmine Collins, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, David Sussillo
    Comments: Submitted to ICLR 2017
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Two potential bottlenecks on the expressiveness of recurrent neural networks
    (RNNs) are their ability to store information about the task in their
    parameters, and to store information about the input history in their units. We
    show experimentally that all common RNN architectures achieve nearly the same
    per-task and per-unit capacity bounds with careful training, for a variety of
    tasks and stacking depths. They can store an amount of task information which
    is linear in the number of parameters, and is approximately 5 bits per
    parameter. They can additionally store approximately one real number from their
    input history per hidden unit. We further find that for several tasks it is the
    per-task parameter capacity bound that determines performance. These results
    suggest that many previous results comparing RNN architectures are driven
    primarily by differences in training effectiveness, rather than differences in
    capacity. Supporting this observation, we compare training difficulty for
    several architectures, and show that vanilla RNNs are far more difficult to
    train, yet have higher capacity. Finally, we propose two novel RNN
    architectures, one of which is easier to train than the LSTM or GRU.

    C-RNN-GAN: Continuous recurrent neural networks with adversarial training

    Olof Mogren
    Comments: Accepted to Constructive Machine Learning Workshop (CML) at NIPS 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, December 10
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Generative adversarial networks have been proposed as a way of efficiently
    training deep generative neural networks. We propose a generative adversarial
    model that works on continuous sequential data, and apply it by training it on
    a collection of classical music. We conclude that it generates music that
    sounds better and better as the model is trained, report statistics on
    generated music, and let the reader judge the quality by downloading the
    generated songs.

    Exploration for Multi-task Reinforcement Learning with Deep Generative Models

    Sai Praveen Bangaru, JS Suhas, Balaraman Ravindran
    Comments: 9 pages, 5 figures; NIPS Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop 2016, Barcelona
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Exploration in multi-task reinforcement learning is critical in training
    agents to deduce the underlying MDP. Many of the existing exploration
    frameworks such as (E^3), (R_{max}), Thompson sampling assume a single
    stationary MDP and are not suitable for system identification in the multi-task
    setting. We present a novel method to facilitate exploration in multi-task
    reinforcement learning using deep generative models. We supplement our method
    with a low dimensional energy model to learn the underlying MDP distribution
    and provide a resilient and adaptive exploration signal to the agent. We
    evaluate our method on a new set of environments and provide intuitive
    interpretation of our results.


    Information Theory

    Capacity limit for faster-than-Nyquist non-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing signals

    Ji Zhou, Yaojun Qiao, Zhanyu Yang, Mengqi Guo, Xizi Tang
    Comments: 10 pages, 9 figures
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signal can achieve higher spectral efficiency and
    capacity than Nyquist signal. For Nyquist signal, the capacity limit was shown
    in the pioneering work of Shannon. However, different from Nyquist signal, FTN
    signal has a smaller pulse interval or narrower subcarrier spacing. What is the
    capacity limit of FTN signal? In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we
    first give the mathematical expression for the capacity limit of FTN
    non-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (NOFDM) signal, which can be
    also applied to FTN non-orthogonal time-division multiplexing signal. The
    mathematical expression shows that the capacity limit for FTN signal is higher
    than Shannon limit for Nyquist signal. Meanwhile, we demonstrate the principle
    of FTN NOFDM by taking fractional cosine transform-based NOFDM (FrCT-NOFDM) for
    instance. As far as we know, FrCT-NOFDM is first proposed in this paper. The
    simulations and experiments have been demonstrated to verify the feasibility of
    FrCT-NOFDM. When the bandwidth compression factor alpha is set to 0.8, the
    subcarrier spacing is equal to 40% of the symbol rate per subcarrier. The
    transmission rate is about 25% faster than Nyquist rate and the capacity limit
    is 25% higher than Shannon limit.

    Opportunistic Scheduling for Network Coded Data in Wireless Multicast Networks

    Nadieh Moghadam, Mohammad Mohebbi, Hongxiang Li
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper queue stability in a single-hop wireless multicast networks
    over erasure channels is analyzed. First, a queuing model consisting of several
    sub-queues is introduced. Under the queueing stability constraint, we adopt
    Lyapunov optimization model and define decision variables to derive a network
    coding based packet scheduling algorithm, which has significantly less
    complexity and shorter queue size compared with the existing solutions.
    Further, the proposed algorithm is modified to meet the requirements of
    time-critical data. Finally, the simulation results verify the effectiveness of
    our proposed algorithm.

    Maximum Likelihood Criteria for Binary Asymmetric Channels

    Claudio Qureshi, Sueli I. R. Costa, Christiane B. Rodrigues, Marcelo Firer
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This work concerns with the (n)-fold binary asymmetric channels
    ((mbox{BAC}^n)). An equivalence relation between two channels can be
    characterized by both having the same decision criterion when maximum
    likelihood is considered. We introduce here a function (mathcal{S}) (the
    BAC-function) such that the parameters ((p,q)) of the binary channel which
    determine equivalent channels belong to certain region delimited by its level
    curves. Explicit equations determining these regions are given and the number
    of different (mbox{BAC}^{n}) classes is determined. A discusion on the size of
    these regions is also presented.

    Bandlimited Field Reconstruction from Samples Obtained at Unknown Random Locations on a Grid

    Ankur Mallick, Animesh Kumar
    Comments: 10 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Trans on Signal Processing for review
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    We study the sampling of spatial fields using sensors that are
    location-unaware but deployed according to a known statistical distribution. It
    has been shown that uniformly distributed location-unaware sensors cannot infer
    bandlimited fields due to the symmetry and shift-invariance of the field.

    This work studies asymmetric (nonuniform) distributions on location-unaware
    sensors that will enable bandlimited field inference. For the sake of
    analytical tractability, location-unaware sensors are restricted to a discrete
    grid. Oversampling followed by clustering of the samples using the probability
    distribution that governs sensor placement on the grid is used to infer the
    field . Based on this clustering algorithm, the main result of this work is to
    find the optimal probability distribution on sensor locations that minimizes
    the detection error-probability of the underlying spatial field. The proposed
    clustering algorithm is also extended to include the case of signal
    reconstruction in the presence of sensor noise by treating the distribution of
    the noisy samples as a mixture model and using clustering to estimate the
    mixture model parameters.

    Iterative Methods for Sparse Signal Reconstruction from Level Crossings

    Mahdi Boloursaz Mashhadi (Student member, IEEE), Farokh Marvasti (Senior Member, IEEE)
    Comments: Submitted to IEEE Signal Processing Letters
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This letter considers the problem of sparse signal reconstruction from the
    timing of its Level Crossings (LC)s. We formulate the sparse Zero Crossing (ZC)
    reconstruction problem in terms of a single 1-bit Compressive Sensing (CS)
    model. We also extend the Smoothed L0 (SL0) sparse reconstruction algorithm to
    the 1-bit CS framework and propose the Binary SL0 (BSL0) algorithm for
    iterative reconstruction of the sparse signal from ZCs in cases where the
    number of sparse coefficients is not known to the reconstruction algorithm a
    priori. Similar to the ZC case, we propose a system of simultaneously
    constrained signed-CS problems to reconstruct a sparse signal from its Level
    Crossings (LC)s and modify both the Binary Iterative Hard Thresholding (BIHT)
    and BSL0 algorithms to solve this problem. Simulation results demonstrate
    superior performance of the proposed LC reconstruction techniques in comparison
    with the literature.

    ADMM-based Fast Algorithm for Multi-group Multicast Beamforming in Large-Scale Wireless Systems

    Erkai Chen, Meixia Tao
    Comments: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Multi-group multicast beamforming in wireless systems with large antenna
    arrays and massive audience is investigated in this paper. Multicast
    beamforming design is a well-known non-convex quadratically constrained
    quadratic programming (QCQP) problem. A conventional method to tackle this
    problem is to approximate it as a semi-definite programming problem via
    semi-definite relaxation, whose performance, however, deteriorates considerably
    as the number of per-group users goes large. A recent attempt is to apply
    convex-concave procedure (CCP) to find a stationary solution by treating it as
    a difference of convex programming problem, whose complexity, however,
    increases dramatically as the problem size increases. In this paper, we propose
    a low-complexity high-performance algorithm for multi-group multicast
    beamforming design in large-scale wireless systems by leveraging the
    alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) together with CCP. In
    specific, the original non-convex QCQP problem is first approximated as a
    sequence of convex subproblems via CCP. Each convex subproblem is then
    reformulated as a novel ADMM form. Our ADMM reformulation enables that each
    updating step is performed by solving multiple small-size subproblems with
    closed-form solutions in parallel. Numerical results show that our fast
    algorithm maintains the same favorable performance as state-of-the-art
    algorithms but reduces the complexity by orders of magnitude.

    On Binary de Bruijn Sequences from LFSRs with Arbitrary Characteristic Polynomials

    Zuling Chang, Martianus Frederic Ezerman, San Ling, Huaxiong Wang
    Comments: 15 pages
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    We propose a construction of de Bruijn sequences by the cycle joining method
    from linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) with arbitrary characteristic
    polynomial (f(x)). We study in detail the cycle structure of the set
    (Omega(f(x))) that contains all sequences produced by a specific LFSR on
    distinct inputs and provide an efficient way to find a state of each cycle. Our
    structural results lead to an efficient algorithm to find all conjugate pairs
    between any two cycles, yielding the adjacency graph. The approach provides a
    practical method to generate a large class of de Bruijn sequences. Many
    recently-proposed constructions of de Bruijn sequences are shown to be special
    cases of our construction.

    Characterization and Efficient Exhaustive Search Algorithm for Elementary Trapping Sets of Irregular LDPC Codes

    Yoones Hashemi, Amir H. Banihashemi
    Comments: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.04954
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper, we propose a characterization of elementary trapping sets
    (ETSs) for irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These sets are
    known to be the main culprits in the error floor region of such codes. The
    characterization of ETSs for irregular codes has been known to be a challenging
    problem due to the large variety of non-isomorphic ETS structures that can
    exist within the Tanner graph of these codes. This is a direct consequence of
    the variety of the degrees of the variable nodes that can participate in such
    structures. The proposed characterization is based on a hierarchical graphical
    representation of ETSs, starting from simple cycles of the graph, or from
    single variable nodes, and involves three simple expansion techniques:
    degree-one tree ((dot)), (path) and (lollipop), thus, the terminology {em dpl
    characterization}. A similar dpl characterization was proposed in an earlier
    work by the authors for the leafless ETSs (LETSs) of variable-regular LDPC
    codes. The present paper generalizes the prior work to codes with a variety of
    variable node degrees and to ETSs that are not leafless. The proposed dpl
    characterization corresponds to an efficient search algorithm that, for a given
    irregular LDPC code, can find all the instances of ((a,b)) ETSs with size (a)
    and with the number of unsatisfied check nodes (b) within any range of interest
    (a leq a_{max}) and (b leq b_{max}), exhaustively. Although, (brute force)
    exhaustive search algorithms for ETSs of irregular LDPC codes exist, to the
    best of our knowledge, the proposed search algorithm is the first of its kind,
    in that, it is devised based on a characterization of ETSs that makes the
    search process efficient. Extensive simulation results are presented to show
    the versatility of the search algorithm, and to demonstrate that, compared to
    the literature, significant improvement in search speed can be obtained.

    Cauchy MDS Array Codes With Efficient Decoding Method

    Hanxu Hou, Yunghsiang S. Han
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Array codes have been widely used in communication and storage systems. To
    reduce computational complexity, one important property of the array codes is
    that only XOR operation is used in the encoding and decoding process. In this
    work, we present a novel family of maximal-distance separable (MDS) array codes
    based on Cauchy matrix, which can correct up to any number of failures. We also
    propose an efficient decoding method for the new codes to recover the failures.
    We show that the encoding/decoding complexities of the proposed approach are
    lower than those of existing Cauchy MDS array codes, such as Rabin-Like codes
    and CRS codes. Thus, the proposed MDS array codes are attractive for
    distributed storage systems.

    Performance Limits of Energy Detection Systems with Massive Receiver Arrays

    Lishuai Jing, Zoran Utkovski, Elisabeth de Carvalho, Petar Popovski
    Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Energy detection (ED) is an attractive technique for symbol detection at
    receivers equipped with a large number of antennas, for example in millimeter
    wave communication systems. This paper investigates the performance bounds of
    ED with pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) in large antenna arrays under single
    stream transmission and fast fading assumptions. The analysis leverages
    information-theoretic tools and semi-numerical approach to provide bounds on
    the information rate, which are shown to be tight in the low and high
    signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes, respectively. For a fixed constellation
    size, the impact of the number of antennas and SNR on the achievable
    information rate is investigated. Based on the results, heuristics are provided
    for the choice of the cardinality of the adaptive modulation scheme as a
    function of the SNR and the number of antennas.

    Batch and PIR Codes and Their Connections to Locally-Repairable Codes

    Vitaly Skachek
    Comments: Survey, 15 pages
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this survey, we discuss two related families of codes: batch codes and
    codes for private information retrieval (PIR codes). These two families can be
    viewed as natural generalizations of locally-repairable codes, which were
    extensively studied in the context of coding for fault tolerance in distributed
    data storage systems. For the sake of completeness, we introduce all necessary
    notations and definitions, which are used in the sequel.

    Anchored Correlation Explanation: Topic Modeling with Minimal Domain Knowledge

    Ryan J. Gallagher, Kyle Reing, David Kale, Greg Ver Steeg
    Comments: 17 pages, 5 figures
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Information Theory (cs.IT); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Popular approaches to topic modeling often invoke the use of probabilistic
    generative models, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). While such models
    have enjoyed widespread use and proven fruitful, these models or generalizing
    them to incorporate human input requires detailed and often unrealistic
    assumptions about the data generating process. We introduce a new approach to
    topic modeling via Correlation Explanation (CorEx), which leverages an
    information-theoretic framework to bypass typical topic modeling assumptions.
    Using two challenging, real-world datasets, we demonstrate that CorEx yields
    results that are comparable to LDA in terms of semantic coherence and document
    classification. We then devise a flexible methodology for incorporating
    word-level domain knowledge into CorEx by introducing anchor words in a manner
    reminiscent of the information bottleneck. Augmenting CorEx with anchor words
    allows the topic model to be guided with minimal human intervention towards
    topics that do not naturally emerge. Furthermore, we show that these new topics
    are often highly coherent and act as better predictors in document
    classification.

    Learning Radio Resource Management in 5G Networks: Framework, Opportunities and Challenges

    Francesco D. Calabrese, Li Wang, Euhanna Ghadimi, Gunnar Peters, Pablo Soldati
    Comments: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazine
    Subjects: Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Information Theory (cs.IT); Optimization and Control (math.OC)

    The fifth generation (5G) of mobile broadband shall be a far more complex
    system compared to earlier generations due to advancements in radio and network
    technology, increased densification and heterogeneity of network and user
    equipment, larger number of operating bands, as well as more stringent
    performance requirement. To cope with the increased complexity of the Radio
    Resources Management (RRM) of 5G systems, this manuscript advocates the need
    for a clean slate design of the 5G RRM architecture. We propose to capitalize
    the large amount of data readily available in the network from measurements and
    system observations in combination with the most recent advances in the field
    of machine learning. The result is an RRM architecture based on general-purpose
    learning framework capable of deriving specific RRM control policies directly
    from data gathered in the network. The potential of this approach is verified
    in three case studies and future directions on application of machine learning
    to RRM are discussed.

    Decoding from Pooled Data: Sharp Information-Theoretic Bounds

    Ahmed El Alaoui, Aaditya Ramdas, Florent Krzakala, Lenka Zdeborova, Michael I. Jordan
    Subjects: Probability (math.PR); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Consider a population consisting of n individuals, each of whom has one of d
    types (e.g. their blood type, in which case d=4). We are allowed to query this
    database by specifying a subset of the population, and in response we observe a
    noiseless histogram (a d-dimensional vector of counts) of types of the pooled
    individuals. This measurement model arises in practical situations such as
    pooling of genetic data and may also be motivated by privacy considerations. We
    are interested in the number of queries one needs to unambiguously determine
    the type of each individual. In this paper, we study this information-theoretic
    question under the random, dense setting where in each query, a random subset
    of individuals of size proportional to n is chosen. This makes the problem a
    particular example of a random constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) with a
    “planted” solution. We establish almost matching upper and lower bounds on the
    minimum number of queries m such that there is no solution other than the
    planted one with probability tending to 1 as n tends to infinity. Our proof
    relies on the computation of the exact “annealed free energy” of this model in
    the thermodynamic limit, which corresponds to the exponential rate of decay of
    the expected number of solution to this planted CSP. As a by-product of the
    analysis, we show an identity of independent interest relating the Gaussian
    integral over the space of Eulerian flows of a graph to its spanning tree
    polynomial.




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