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    arXiv Paper Daily: Fri, 10 Feb 2017

    我爱机器学习(52ml.net)发表于 2017-02-10 00:00:00
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    Neural and Evolutionary Computing

    Energy Saving Additive Neural Network

    Arman Afrasiyabi, Ozan Yildiz, Baris Nasir, Fatos T. Yarman Vural, A. Enis Cetin
    Comments: 8 pages (double column), 2 figures, 1 table
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    In recent years, machine learning techniques based on neural networks for
    mobile computing become increasingly popular. Classical multi-layer neural
    networks require matrix multiplications at each stage. Multiplication operation
    is not an energy efficient operation and consequently it drains the battery of
    the mobile device. In this paper, we propose a new energy efficient neural
    network with the universal approximation property over space of Lebesgue
    integrable functions. This network, called, additive neural network, is very
    suitable for mobile computing. The neural structure is based on a novel vector
    product definition, called ef-operator, that permits a multiplier-free
    implementation. In ef-operation, the “product” of two real numbers is defined
    as the sum of their absolute values, with the sign determined by the sign of
    the product of the numbers. This “product” is used to construct a vector
    product in (R^N). The vector product induces the (l_1) norm. The proposed
    additive neural network successfully solves the XOR problem. The experiments on
    MNIST dataset show that the classification performances of the proposed
    additive neural networks are very similar to the corresponding multi-layer
    perceptron and convolutional neural networks (LeNet).

    Neural Causal Regularization under the Independence of Mechanisms Assumption

    Mohammad Taha Bahadori, Krzysztof Chalupka, Edward Choi, Robert Chen, Walter F. Stewart, Jimeng Sun
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Neural networks provide a powerful framework for learning the association
    between input and response variables and making accurate predictions and offer
    promise in using the rapidly growing volume of health care data to surface
    causal relationships that cannot necessarily be tested in randomized clinical
    trials. In pursuit of models whose predictive power comes maximally from causal
    variables, we propose a novel causal regularizer based on the assumption about
    independence of different steps of data generation process. We use the causal
    regularizer to steer deep neural network architectures towards
    causally-interpretable solutions. We perform a large-scale analysis of
    electronic health records. Our causally-regularized algorithm outperforms its
    L1-regularized counterpart both in predictive performance as well as causal
    relevance. Finally, we show that the proposed causal regularizer can be used
    together with representation learning algorithms to yield up to 20% improvement
    in the causality score of the generated multivariate hypotheses.


    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

    EAC-Net: A Region-based Deep Enhancing and Cropping Approach for Facial Action Unit Detection

    Wei Li, Farnaz Abtahi, Zhigang Zhu, Lijun Yin
    Comments: The paper is accepted by FG 2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this paper, we propose a deep learning based approach for facial action
    unit detection by enhancing and cropping the regions of interest. The approach
    is implemented by adding two novel nets (layers): the enhancing layers and the
    cropping layers, to a pretrained CNN model. For the enhancing layers, we
    designed an attention map based on facial landmark features and applied it to a
    pretrained neural network to conduct enhanced learning (The E-Net). For the
    cropping layers, we crop facial regions around the detected landmarks and
    design convolutional layers to learn deeper features for each facial region
    (C-Net). We then fuse the E-Net and the C-Net to obtain our Enhancing and
    Cropping (EAC) Net, which can learn both feature enhancing and region cropping
    functions. Our approach shows significant improvement in performance compared
    to the state-of-the-art methods applied to BP4D and DISFA AU datasets.

    Attribute-controlled face photo synthesis from simple line drawing

    Qi Guo, Ce Zhu, Zhiqiang Xia, Zhengtao Wang, Yipeng Liu
    Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Face photo synthesis from simple line drawing is a one-to-many task as simple
    line drawing merely contains the contour of human face. Previous exemplar-based
    methods are over-dependent on the datasets and are hard to generalize to
    complicated natural scenes. Recently, several works utilize deep neural
    networks to increase the generalization, but they are still limited in the
    controllability of the users. In this paper, we propose a deep generative model
    to synthesize face photo from simple line drawing controlled by face attributes
    such as hair color and complexion. In order to maximize the controllability of
    face attributes, an attribute-disentangled variational auto-encoder (AD-VAE) is
    firstly introduced to learn latent representations disentangled with respect to
    specified attributes. Then we conduct photo synthesis from simple line drawing
    based on AD-VAE. Experiments show that our model can well disentangle the
    variations of attributes from other variations of face photos and synthesize
    detailed photorealistic face images with desired attributes. Regarding
    background and illumination as the style and human face as the content, we can
    also synthesize face photos with the target style of a style photo.

    On-the-Fly Adaptation of Regression Forests for Online Camera Relocalisation

    Tommaso Cavallari, Stuart Golodetz, Nicholas A. Lord, Julien Valentin, Luigi Di Stefano, Philip H. S. Torr
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Camera relocalisation is a key problem in computer vision, with applications
    as diverse as simultaneous localisation and mapping, virtual/augmented reality
    and navigation. Common techniques either match the current image against
    keyframes with known poses coming from a tracker, or establish 2D-to-3D
    correspondences between keypoints in the current image and points in the scene
    in order to estimate the camera pose. Recently, regression forests have become
    a popular alternative to establish such correspondences. They achieve accurate
    results, but must be trained offline on the target scene, preventing
    relocalisation in new environments. In this paper, we show how to circumvent
    this limitation by adapting a pre-trained forest to a new scene on the fly. Our
    adapted forests achieve relocalisation performance that is on par with that of
    offline forests, and our approach runs in under 150ms, making it desirable for
    real-time systems that require online relocalisation.

    L1-regularized Reconstruction Error as Alpha Matte

    Jubin Johnson, Hisham Cholakkal, Deepu Rajan
    Comments: 5 pages, 5 figure, Accepted in IEEE Signal Processing Letters
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Sampling-based alpha matting methods have traditionally followed the
    compositing equation to estimate the alpha value at a pixel from a pair of
    foreground (F) and background (B) samples. The (F,B) pair that produces the
    least reconstruction error is selected, followed by alpha estimation. The
    significance of that residual error has been left unexamined. In this letter,
    we propose a video matting algorithm that uses L1-regularized reconstruction
    error of F and B samples as a measure of the alpha matte. A multi-frame
    non-local means framework using coherency sensitive hashing is utilized to
    ensure temporal coherency in the video mattes. Qualitative and quantitative
    evaluations on a dataset exclusively for video matting demonstrate the
    effectiveness of the proposed matting algorithm.

    CNN-based Estimation of Abdominal Circumference from Ultrasound images

    Jaeseong Jang, Ja-Young Kwon, Bukweon Kim, Sung Min Lee, Yejin Park, Jin Keun Seo
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    The obstetrics and gynecology ultrasound diagnosis is routinely used to check
    fetal biometry, and due to its time-consuming routine process, there has been
    great demand of automatic estimation. Automated analysis of ultrasound images
    is complicated because ultrasound images are patient-specific,
    operator-dependent, and machine specific. Among fetal biometry, abdominal
    circumference (AC) is more difficult to make accurate measurement automatically
    because abdomen has low contrast against surroundings, non-uniform contrast and
    irregular shape compared to other parameters. This paper proposes a framework
    for estimation of the fetal AC from 2D ultrasound data by a specially designed
    convolutional neural network (CNN) which takes account of doctors’ decision
    process, anatomical structure, and the characteristics of ultrasound image. The
    proposed framework uses CNN to classify ultrasound images (stomach bubble,
    amniotic fluid, and umbilical vein) and the Hough transform for the measurement
    of the AC. We tested the proposed method using clinical ultrasound data
    acquired from 10 pregnant women. Experimental results showed that, with
    relatively small training samples, the proposed CNN provided sufficient
    classification results for AC estimation through the Hough transform. This
    framework showed good performance on most cases and even for ultrasound images
    deteriorated by shadowing artifacts. However, for oversized fetus cases, when
    amniotic fluid is not seen or abdominal area was distorted, it could not
    estimate correct AC.

    Joint Discovery of Object States and Manipulating Actions

    Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Josev Sivic, Ivan Laptev, Simon Lacoste-Julien
    Comments: 12 pages
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    Many activities involve object manipulations aiming to modify object state.
    Examples of common state changes include full/empty bottle, open/closed door,
    and attached/detached car wheel. In this work, we seek to automatically
    discover the states of objects and the associated manipulating actions. Given a
    set of videos for a particular task, we propose a joint model that learns to
    identify object states and to localize state-modifying actions. Our model is
    formulated as a discriminative clustering cost. We assume a consistent temporal
    order for the changes in object states and manipulating actions, and learn the
    model without additional supervision. Our method is validated on a new dataset
    of videos depicting real-life object manipulations. We demonstrate the
    successful discovery of seven manipulating actions and corresponding object
    states. Moreover, we emphasize our joint formulation and show the improvement
    of object state discovery by action recognition and vice versa.

    Effective face landmark localization via single deep network

    Zongping Deng, Ke Li, Qijun Zhao, Yi Zhang, Hu Chen
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this paper, we propose a novel face alignment method using single deep
    network (SDN) on existing limited training data. Rather than using a
    max-pooling layer followed one convolutional layer in typical convolutional
    neural networks (CNN), SDN adopts a stack of 3 layer groups instead. Each group
    layer contains two convolutional layers and a max-pooling layer, which can
    extract the features hierarchically. Moreover, an effective data augmentation
    strategy and corresponding training skills are also proposed to over-come the
    lack of training images on COFW and 300-W da-tasets. The experiment results
    show that our method outper-forms state-of-the-art methods in both detection
    accuracy and speed.

    Predicting Privileged Information for Height Estimation

    Nikolaos Sarafianos, Christophoros Nikou, Ioannis A. Kakadiaris
    Comments: Published in ICPR 2016
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this paper, we propose a novel regression-based method for employing
    privileged information to estimate the height using human metrology. The actual
    values of the anthropometric measurements are difficult to estimate accurately
    using state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms. Hence, we use ratios of
    anthropometric measurements as features. Since many anthropometric measurements
    are not available at test time in real-life scenarios, we employ a learning
    using privileged information (LUPI) framework in a regression setup. Instead of
    using the LUPI paradigm for regression in its original form (i.e.,
    epsilon-SVR+), we train regression models that predict the privileged
    information at test time. The predictions are then used, along with observable
    features, to perform height estimation. Once the height is estimated, a mapping
    to classes is performed. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can estimate
    the height better and faster than the epsilon-SVR+ algorithm and report
    results for different genders and quartiles of humans.

    Semi-Supervised Deep Learning for Monocular Depth Map Prediction

    Yevhen Kuznietsov, Jörg Stückler, Bastian Leibe
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Supervised deep learning often suffers from the lack of sufficient training
    data. Specifically in the context of monocular depth map prediction, it is
    barely possible to determine dense ground truth depth images in realistic
    dynamic outdoor environments. When using LiDAR sensors, for instance, noise is
    present in the distance measurements, the calibration between sensors cannot be
    perfect, and the measurements are typically much sparser than the camera
    images. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to depth map prediction from
    monocular images that learns in a semi-supervised way. While we use sparse
    ground-truth depth for supervised learning, we also enforce our deep network to
    produce photoconsistent dense depth maps in a stereo setup using a direct image
    alignment loss. In experiments we demonstrate superior performance in depth map
    prediction from single images compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

    Manifold Based Low-rank Regularization for Image Restoration and Semi-supervised Learning

    Rongjie Lai, Jia Li
    Comments: 23 pages, 13 figures
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Numerical Analysis (math.NA)

    Low-rank structures play important role in recent advances of many problems
    in image science and data science. As a natural extension of low-rank
    structures for data with nonlinear structures, the concept of the
    low-dimensional manifold structure has been considered in many data processing
    problems. Inspired by this concept, we consider a manifold based low-rank
    regularization as a linear approximation of manifold dimension. This
    regularization is less restricted than the global low-rank regularization, and
    thus enjoy more flexibility to handle data with nonlinear structures. As
    applications, we demonstrate the proposed regularization to classical inverse
    problems in image sciences and data sciences including image inpainting, image
    super-resolution, X-ray computer tomography (CT) image reconstruction and
    semi-supervised learning. We conduct intensive numerical experiments in several
    image restoration problems and a semi-supervised learning problem of
    classifying handwritten digits using the MINST data. Our numerical tests
    demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods and illustrate that the
    new regularization methods produce outstanding results by comparing with many
    existing methods.

    Incorporation of prior knowledge of the signal behavior into the reconstruction to accelerate the acquisition of MR diffusion data

    Juan F P J Abascal (CREATIS), Manuel Desco, Juan Parra-Robles
    Subjects: Medical Physics (physics.med-ph); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Diffusion MRI measurements using hyperpolarized gases are generally acquired
    during patient breath hold, which yields a compromise between achievable image
    resolution, lung coverage and number of b-values. In this work, we propose a
    novel method that accelerates the acquisition of MR diffusion data by
    undersampling in both spatial and b-value dimensions, thanks to incorporating
    knowledge about the signal decay into the reconstruction (SIDER). SIDER is
    compared to total variation (TV) reconstruction by assessing their effect on
    both the recovery of ventilation images and estimated mean alveolar dimensions
    (MAD). Both methods are assessed by retrospectively undersampling diffusion
    datasets of normal volunteers and COPD patients (n=8) for acceleration factors
    between x2 and x10. TV led to large errors and artefacts for acceleration
    factors equal or larger than x5. SIDER improved TV, presenting lower errors and
    histograms of MAD closer to those obtained from fully sampled data for
    accelerations factors up to x10. SIDER preserved image quality at all
    acceleration factors but images were slightly smoothed and some details were
    lost at x10. In conclusion, we have developed and validated a novel compressed
    sensing method for lung MRI imaging and achieved high acceleration factors,
    which can be used to increase the amount of data acquired during a breath-hold.
    This methodology is expected to improve the accuracy of estimated lung
    microstructure dimensions and widen the possibilities of studying lung diseases
    with MRI.


    Artificial Intelligence

    Optimal Detection of Faulty Traffic Sensors Used in Route Planning

    Amin Ghafouri, Aron Laszka, Abhishek Dubey, Xenofon Koutsoukos
    Comments: Submitted to the Second International Workshop on Science of Smart City Operations and Platforms Engineering (SCOPE), Pittsburg, PA, 2017
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Systems and Control (cs.SY)

    In a smart city, real-time traffic sensors may be deployed for various
    applications, such as route planning. Unfortunately, sensors are prone to
    failures, which result in erroneous traffic data. Erroneous data can adversely
    affect applications such as route planning, and can cause increased travel time
    and environmental impact. To minimize the impact of sensor failures, we must
    detect them promptly and with high accuracy. However, typical detection
    algorithms may lead to a large number of false positives (i.e., false alarms)
    and false negatives (i.e., missed detections), which can result in suboptimal
    route planning. In this paper, we devise an effective detector for identifying
    faulty traffic sensors using a prediction model based on Gaussian Processes.
    Further, we present an approach for computing the optimal parameters of the
    detector which minimize losses due to false-positive and false-negative errors.
    We also characterize critical sensors, whose failure can have high impact on
    the route planning application. Finally, we implement our method and evaluate
    it numerically using a real-world dataset and the route planning platform
    OpenTripPlanner.

    Answer Set Solving with Bounded Treewidth Revisited

    Johannes Fichte, Markus Hecher, Michael Morak, Stefan Woltran
    Comments: This paper extends and updates a paper that has been presented on the workshop TAASP’16 (arXiv:1612.07601). We provide a higher detail level, full proofs and more examples
    Subjects: Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computational Complexity (cs.CC)

    Parameterized algorithms are a way to solve hard problems more efficiently,
    given that a specific parameter of the input is small. In this paper, we apply
    this idea to the field of answer set programming (ASP). To this end, we propose
    two kinds of graph representations of programs to exploit their treewidth as a
    parameter. Treewidth roughly measures to which extent the internal structure of
    a program resembles a tree. Our main contribution is the design of
    parameterized dynamic programming algorithms, which run in linear time if the
    treewidth and weights of the given program are bounded. Compared to previous
    work, our algorithms handle the full syntax of ASP. Finally, we report on an
    empirical evaluation that shows good runtime behaviour for benchmark instances
    of low treewidth, especially for counting answer sets.

    Phase Transitions of the Typical Algorithmic Complexity of the Random Satisfiability Problem Studied with Linear Programming

    Hendrik Schawe, Roman Bleim, Alexander K. Hartmann
    Comments: 8 pages, 8 figures
    Subjects: Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computational Complexity (cs.CC)

    The Boolean Satisfiability problem asks if a Boolean formula is satisfiable
    by some assignment of the variables or not. It belongs to the NP-complete
    complexity class and hence no algorithm with polynomial time worst-case
    complexity is known, i.e., the problem is hard. The K-SAT problem is the subset
    of the Boolean Satisfiability problem, for which the Boolean formula has the
    conjunctive normal form with K literals per clause. This problem is still
    NP-complete for (K ge 3). Although the worst case complexity of NP-complete
    problems is conjectured to be exponential, there might be subsets of the
    realizations where solutions can typically be found in polynomial time. In
    fact, random (K)-SAT, with the number of clauses to number of variables ratio
    (alpha) as control parameter, shows a phase transition between a satisfiable
    phase and an unsatisfiable phase, at which the hardest problems are located. We
    use here several linear programming approaches to reveal further “easy-hard”
    transition points at which the typical hardness of the problems increases which
    means that such algorithms can solve the problem on one side efficiently but
    not beyond this point. For one of these transitions, we observed a coincidence
    with a structural transition of the literal factor graphs of the problem
    instances. We also investigated cutting-plane approaches, which often increase
    the computational efficiency. Also we tried out a mapping to another
    NP-complete optimization problem using a specific algorithm for that problem.
    In both cases, no improvement of the performance was observed, i.e., no shift
    of the easy-hard transition to higher values of (alpha).

    Graph Based Relational Features for Collective Classification

    Immanuel Bayer, Uwe Nagel, Steffen Rendle
    Comments: Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)

    Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) methods have shown that classification
    accuracy can be improved by integrating relations between samples. Techniques
    such as iterative classification or relaxation labeling achieve this by
    propagating information between related samples during the inference process.
    When only a few samples are labeled and connections between samples are sparse,
    collective inference methods have shown large improvements over standard
    feature-based ML methods. However, in contrast to feature based ML, collective
    inference methods require complex inference procedures and often depend on the
    strong assumption of label consistency among related samples. In this paper, we
    introduce new relational features for standard ML methods by extracting
    information from direct and indirect relations. We show empirically on three
    standard benchmark datasets that our relational features yield results
    comparable to collective inference methods. Finally we show that our proposal
    outperforms these methods when additional information is available.

    Energy Saving Additive Neural Network

    Arman Afrasiyabi, Ozan Yildiz, Baris Nasir, Fatos T. Yarman Vural, A. Enis Cetin
    Comments: 8 pages (double column), 2 figures, 1 table
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    In recent years, machine learning techniques based on neural networks for
    mobile computing become increasingly popular. Classical multi-layer neural
    networks require matrix multiplications at each stage. Multiplication operation
    is not an energy efficient operation and consequently it drains the battery of
    the mobile device. In this paper, we propose a new energy efficient neural
    network with the universal approximation property over space of Lebesgue
    integrable functions. This network, called, additive neural network, is very
    suitable for mobile computing. The neural structure is based on a novel vector
    product definition, called ef-operator, that permits a multiplier-free
    implementation. In ef-operation, the “product” of two real numbers is defined
    as the sum of their absolute values, with the sign determined by the sign of
    the product of the numbers. This “product” is used to construct a vector
    product in (R^N). The vector product induces the (l_1) norm. The proposed
    additive neural network successfully solves the XOR problem. The experiments on
    MNIST dataset show that the classification performances of the proposed
    additive neural networks are very similar to the corresponding multi-layer
    perceptron and convolutional neural networks (LeNet).

    Neural Causal Regularization under the Independence of Mechanisms Assumption

    Mohammad Taha Bahadori, Krzysztof Chalupka, Edward Choi, Robert Chen, Walter F. Stewart, Jimeng Sun
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Neural networks provide a powerful framework for learning the association
    between input and response variables and making accurate predictions and offer
    promise in using the rapidly growing volume of health care data to surface
    causal relationships that cannot necessarily be tested in randomized clinical
    trials. In pursuit of models whose predictive power comes maximally from causal
    variables, we propose a novel causal regularizer based on the assumption about
    independence of different steps of data generation process. We use the causal
    regularizer to steer deep neural network architectures towards
    causally-interpretable solutions. We perform a large-scale analysis of
    electronic health records. Our causally-regularized algorithm outperforms its
    L1-regularized counterpart both in predictive performance as well as causal
    relevance. Finally, we show that the proposed causal regularizer can be used
    together with representation learning algorithms to yield up to 20% improvement
    in the causality score of the generated multivariate hypotheses.


    Information Retrieval

    Graph Based Relational Features for Collective Classification

    Immanuel Bayer, Uwe Nagel, Steffen Rendle
    Comments: Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)

    Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) methods have shown that classification
    accuracy can be improved by integrating relations between samples. Techniques
    such as iterative classification or relaxation labeling achieve this by
    propagating information between related samples during the inference process.
    When only a few samples are labeled and connections between samples are sparse,
    collective inference methods have shown large improvements over standard
    feature-based ML methods. However, in contrast to feature based ML, collective
    inference methods require complex inference procedures and often depend on the
    strong assumption of label consistency among related samples. In this paper, we
    introduce new relational features for standard ML methods by extracting
    information from direct and indirect relations. We show empirically on three
    standard benchmark datasets that our relational features yield results
    comparable to collective inference methods. Finally we show that our proposal
    outperforms these methods when additional information is available.

    Mining User/Movie Preferred Features Based on Reviews for Video Recommendation System

    Xuan-Son Vu, Seong-Bae Park
    Comments: The 2nd Workshop on Future Researches of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyungpook National University, pp. 21-24, 2014
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    In this work, we present an approach for mining user preferences and
    recommendation based on reviews. There have been various studies worked on
    recommendation problem. However, most of the studies beyond one aspect user
    generated- content such as user ratings, user feedback and so on to state user
    preferences. There is a prob- lem in one aspect mining is lacking for stating
    user preferences. As a demonstration, in collaborative filter recommendation,
    we try to figure out the preference trend of crowded users, then use that trend
    to predict current user preference. Therefore, there is a gap between real user
    preferences and the trend of the crowded people. Additionally, user preferences
    can be addressed from mining user reviews since user often comment about
    various aspects of products. To solve this problem, we mainly focus on mining
    product aspects and user aspects inside user reviews to directly state user
    preferences. We also take into account Social Network Analysis for cold-start
    item problem. With cold-start user problem, collaborative filter algorithm is
    employed in our work. The framework is general enough to be applied to
    different recommendation domains. Theoretically, our method would achieve a
    significant enhancement.


    Computation and Language

    Challenges in Providing Automatic Affective Feedback in Instant Messaging Applications

    Chieh-Yang Huang, Ting-Hao (Kenneth)
    Huang, Lun-Wei Ku
    Comments: 7 pages, 2017 AAAI Spring Symposia
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

    Instant messaging is one of the major channels of computer mediated
    communication. However, humans are known to be very limited in understanding
    others’ emotions via text-based communication. Aiming on introducing emotion
    sensing technologies to instant messaging, we developed EmotionPush, a system
    that automatically detects the emotions of the messages end-users received on
    Facebook Messenger and provides colored cues on their smartphones accordingly.
    We conducted a deployment study with 20 participants during a time span of two
    weeks. In this paper, we revealed five challenges, along with examples, that we
    observed in our study based on both user’s feedback and chat logs, including
    (i)the continuum of emotions, (ii)multi-user conversations, (iii)different
    dynamics between different users, (iv)misclassification of emotions and
    (v)unconventional content. We believe this discussion will benefit the future
    exploration of affective computing for instant messaging, and also shed light
    on research of conversational emotion sensing.

    Character-level Deep Conflation for Business Data Analytics

    Zhe Gan, P. D. Singh, Ameet Joshi, Xiaodong He, Jianshu Chen, Jianfeng Gao, Li Deng
    Comments: Accepted for publication, at ICASSP 2017
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    Connecting different text attributes associated with the same entity
    (conflation) is important in business data analytics since it could help merge
    two different tables in a database to provide a more comprehensive profile of
    an entity. However, the conflation task is challenging because two text strings
    that describe the same entity could be quite different from each other for
    reasons such as misspelling. It is therefore critical to develop a conflation
    model that is able to truly understand the semantic meaning of the strings and
    match them at the semantic level. To this end, we develop a character-level
    deep conflation model that encodes the input text strings from character level
    into finite dimension feature vectors, which are then used to compute the
    cosine similarity between the text strings. The model is trained in an
    end-to-end manner using back propagation and stochastic gradient descent to
    maximize the likelihood of the correct association. Specifically, we propose
    two variants of the deep conflation model, based on long-short-term memory
    (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN),
    respectively. Both models perform well on a real-world business analytics
    dataset and significantly outperform the baseline bag-of-character (BoC) model.

    Convolutional Neural Network for Humor Recognition

    Lei Chen, Chong MIn Lee
    Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    For the purpose of automatically evaluating speakers’ humor usage, we build a
    presentation corpus containing humorous utterances based on TED talks. Compared
    to previous data resources supporting humor recognition research, ours has
    several advantages, including (a) both positive and negative instances coming
    from a homogeneous data set, (b) containing a large number of speakers, and (c)
    being open. Focusing on using lexical cues for humor recognition, we
    systematically compare a newly emerging text classification method based on
    Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with a well-established conventional
    method using linguistic knowledge. The CNN method shows its advantages on both
    higher recognition accuracies and being able to learn essential features
    automatically.

    Mining User/Movie Preferred Features Based on Reviews for Video Recommendation System

    Xuan-Son Vu, Seong-Bae Park
    Comments: The 2nd Workshop on Future Researches of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyungpook National University, pp. 21-24, 2014
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    In this work, we present an approach for mining user preferences and
    recommendation based on reviews. There have been various studies worked on
    recommendation problem. However, most of the studies beyond one aspect user
    generated- content such as user ratings, user feedback and so on to state user
    preferences. There is a prob- lem in one aspect mining is lacking for stating
    user preferences. As a demonstration, in collaborative filter recommendation,
    we try to figure out the preference trend of crowded users, then use that trend
    to predict current user preference. Therefore, there is a gap between real user
    preferences and the trend of the crowded people. Additionally, user preferences
    can be addressed from mining user reviews since user often comment about
    various aspects of products. To solve this problem, we mainly focus on mining
    product aspects and user aspects inside user reviews to directly state user
    preferences. We also take into account Social Network Analysis for cold-start
    item problem. With cold-start user problem, collaborative filter algorithm is
    employed in our work. The framework is general enough to be applied to
    different recommendation domains. Theoretically, our method would achieve a
    significant enhancement.


    Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

    Robust Orchestration of Concurrent Application Workflows in Mobile Device Clouds

    Parul Pandey, Hariharasudhan Viswanathan, Dario Pompili
    Comments: 25 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, 2 algorithms
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    A hybrid mobile/fixed device cloud that harnesses sensing, computing,
    communication, and storage capabilities of mobile and fixed devices in the
    field as well as those of computing and storage servers in remote datacenters
    is envisioned. Mobile device clouds can be harnessed to enable innovative
    pervasive applications that rely on real-time, in-situ processing of sensor
    data collected in the field. To support concurrent mobile applications on the
    device cloud, a robust and secure distributed computing framework, called
    Maestro, is proposed. The key components of Maestro are (i) a task scheduling
    mechanism that employs controlled task replication in addition to task
    reallocation for robustness and (ii) Dedup for task deduplication among
    concurrent pervasive workflows. An architecture-based solution that relies on
    task categorization and authorized access to the categories of tasks is
    proposed for different levels of protection. Experimental evaluation through
    prototype testbed of Android- and Linux-based mobile devices as well as
    simulations is performed to demonstrate Maestro’s capabilities.

    Distributed Domination on Graph Classes of Bounded Expansion

    Saeed Akhoondian Amiri, Patrice Ossona de Mendez, Roman Rabinovich, Sebastian Siebertz
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS)

    We provide a new constant factor approximation algorithm for the (connected)
    distance-(r) dominating set problem on graph classes of bounded expansion.
    Classes of bounded expansion include many familiar classes of sparse graphs
    such as planar graphs and graphs with excluded (topological) minors, and
    notably, these classes form the most general subgraph closed classes of graphs
    for which a sequential constant factor approximation algorithm for the
    distance-(r) dominating set problem is currently known. Our algorithm can be
    implemented in the (mathcal{CONGEST}_{mathrm{BC}}) model of distributed
    computing and uses (mathcal{O}(r^2 log n)) communication rounds.

    Our techniques, which may be of independent interest, are based on a
    distributed computation of sparse neighborhood covers of small radius on
    bounded expansion classes. We show how to compute an (r)-neighborhood cover of
    radius (2r) and overlap (f(r)) on every class of bounded expansion in
    (mathcal{O}(r^2log n)) communication rounds.

    Finally, we show how to use the greater power of the (mathcal{LOCAL}) model
    to turn any distance-(r) dominating set into a constantly larger connected
    distance-(r) dominating set in (3r+1) rounds on any class of bounded expansion.
    Combining this algorithm, e.g., with the constant factor approximation
    algorithm for dominating sets on planar graphs of Lenzen et al. gives a
    constant factor approximation algorithm for connected dominating sets on planar
    graphs in a constant number of rounds in the (mathcal{LOCAL}) model, where the
    approximation ratio is only (6) times larger than that of Lenzen et al.’s
    algorithm.

    UStore: A Distributed Storage With Rich Semantics

    Anh Dinh, Ji Wang, Sheng Wang, Gang Chen, Wei-Ngan Chin, Qian Lin, Beng Chin Ooi, Pingcheng Ruan, Kian-Lee Tan, Zhongle Xie, Hao Zhang, Meihui Zhang
    Comments: 21 pages
    Subjects: Databases (cs.DB); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Today’s storage systems expose abstractions which are either too low-level
    (e.g., key-value store, raw-block store) that they require developers to
    re-invent the wheels, or too high-level (e.g., relational databases, Git) that
    they lack generality to support many classes of applications. In this work, we
    propose and implement a general distributed data storage system, called UStore,
    which has rich semantics. UStore delivers three key properties, namely
    immutability, sharing and security, which unify and add values to many classes
    of today’s applications, and which also open the door for new applications. By
    keeping the core properties within the storage, UStore helps reduce application
    development efforts while offering high performance at hand. The storage
    embraces current hardware trends as key enablers. It is built around a
    data-structure similar to that of Git, a popular source code versioning system,
    but it also synthesizes many designs from distributed systems and databases.
    Our current implementation of UStore has better performance than general
    in-memory key-value storage systems, especially for version scan operations. We
    port and evaluate four applications on top of UStore: a Git-like application, a
    collaborative data science application, a transaction management application,
    and a blockchain application. We demonstrate that UStore enables faster
    development and the UStore-backed applications can have better performance than
    the existing implementations.


    Learning

    Spatial Filtering for EEG-Based Regression Problems in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)

    Dongrui Wu, Jung-Tai King, Chun-Hsiang Chuang, Chin-Teng Lin, Tzyy-Ping Jung
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

    Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are frequently used in brain-computer
    interfaces (BCIs), but they are easily contaminated by artifacts and noises, so
    preprocessing must be done before they are fed into a machine learning
    algorithm for classification or regression. Spatial filters have been widely
    used to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of EEG for BCI classification
    problems, but their applications in BCI regression problems have been very
    limited. This paper proposes two common spatial pattern (CSP) filters for
    EEG-based regression problems in BCI, which are extended from the CSP filter
    for classification, by making use of fuzzy sets. Experimental results on
    EEG-based response speed estimation from a large-scale study, which collected
    143 sessions of sustained-attention psychomotor vigilance task data from 17
    subjects during a 5-month period, demonstrate that the two proposed spatial
    filters can significantly increase the EEG signal quality. When used in LASSO
    and k-nearest neighbors regression for user response speed estimation, the
    spatial filters can reduce the root mean square estimation error by
    10.02-19.77%, and at the same time increase the correlation to the true
    response speed by 19.39-86.47%.

    Switching EEG Headsets Made Easy: Reducing Offline Calibration Effort Using Active Weighted Adaptation Regularization

    Dongrui Wu, Vernon J. Lawhern, W. David Hairston, Brent J. Lance
    Journal-ref: IEEE Trans. on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering,
    24(11), pp. 1125-1137 (2016)
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

    Electroencephalography (EEG) headsets are the most commonly used sensing
    devices for Brain-Computer Interface. In real-world applications, there are
    advantages to extrapolating data from one user session to another. However,
    these advantages are limited if the data arise from different hardware systems,
    which often vary between application spaces. Currently, this creates a need to
    recalibrate classifiers, which negatively affects people’s interest in using
    such systems. In this paper, we employ active weighted adaptation
    regularization (AwAR), which integrates weighted adaptation regularization
    (wAR) and active learning, to expedite the calibration process. wAR makes use
    of labeled data from the previous headset and handles class-imbalance, and
    active learning selects the most informative samples from the new headset to
    label. Experiments on single-trial event-related potential classification show
    that AwAR can significantly increase the classification accuracy, given the
    same number of labeled samples from the new headset. In other words, AwAR can
    effectively reduce the number of labeled samples required from the new headset,
    given a desired classification accuracy, suggesting value in collating data for
    use in wide scale transfer-learning applications.

    Driver Drowsiness Estimation from EEG Signals Using Online Weighted Adaptation Regularization for Regression (OwARR)

    Dongrui Wu, Vernon J. Lawhern, Stephen Gordon, Brent J. Lance, Chin-Teng Lin
    Comments: in press
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

    One big challenge that hinders the transition of brain-computer interfaces
    (BCIs) from laboratory settings to real-life applications is the availability
    of high-performance and robust learning algorithms that can effectively handle
    individual differences, i.e., algorithms that can be applied to a new subject
    with zero or very little subject-specific calibration data. Transfer learning
    and domain adaptation have been extensively used for this purpose. However,
    most previous works focused on classification problems. This paper considers an
    important regression problem in BCI, namely, online driver drowsiness
    estimation from EEG signals. By integrating fuzzy sets with domain adaptation,
    we propose a novel online weighted adaptation regularization for regression
    (OwARR) algorithm to reduce the amount of subject-specific calibration data,
    and also a source domain selection (SDS) approach to save about half of the
    computational cost of OwARR. Using a simulated driving dataset with 15
    subjects, we show that OwARR and OwARR-SDS can achieve significantly smaller
    estimation errors than several other approaches. We also provide comprehensive
    analyses on the robustness of OwARR and OwARR-SDS.

    Online and Offline Domain Adaptation for Reducing BCI Calibration Effort

    Dongrui Wu
    Comments: in press
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

    Many real-world brain-computer interface (BCI) applications rely on
    single-trial classification of event-related potentials (ERPs) in EEG signals.
    However, because different subjects have different neural responses to even the
    same stimulus, it is very difficult to build a generic ERP classifier whose
    parameters fit all subjects. The classifier needs to be calibrated for each
    individual subject, using some labeled subject-specific data. This paper
    proposes both online and offline weighted adaptation regularization (wAR)
    algorithms to reduce this calibration effort, i.e., to minimize the amount of
    labeled subject-specific EEG data required in BCI calibration, and hence to
    increase the utility of the BCI system. We demonstrate using a visually-evoked
    potential oddball task and three different EEG headsets that both online and
    offline wAR algorithms significantly outperform several other algorithms.
    Moreover, through source domain selection, we can reduce their computational
    cost by about 50%, making them more suitable for real-time applications.

    Coordinated Online Learning With Applications to Learning User Preferences

    Christoph Hirnschall, Adish Singla, Sebastian Tschiatschek, Andreas Krause
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We study an online multi-task learning setting, in which instances of related
    tasks arrive sequentially, and are handled by task-specific online learners. We
    consider an algorithmic framework to model the relationship of these tasks via
    a set of convex constraints. To exploit this relationship, we design a novel
    algorithm — COOL — for coordinating the individual online learners: Our key
    idea is to coordinate their parameters via weighted projections onto a convex
    set. By adjusting the rate and accuracy of the projection, the COOL algorithm
    allows for a trade-off between the benefit of coordination and the required
    computation/communication. We derive regret bounds for our approach and analyze
    how they are influenced by these trade-off factors. We apply our results on the
    application of learning users’ preferences on the Airbnb marketplace with the
    goal of incentivizing users to explore under-reviewed apartments.

    Inductive Pairwise Ranking: Going Beyond the n log(n) Barrier

    U.N. Niranjan, Arun Rajkumar
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Information Theory (cs.IT); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We study the problem of ranking a set of items from nonactively chosen
    pairwise preferences where each item has feature information with it. We
    propose and characterize a very broad class of preference matrices giving rise
    to the Feature Low Rank (FLR) model, which subsumes several models ranging from
    the classic Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) (Bradley and Terry 1952) and Thurstone
    (Thurstone 1927) models to the recently proposed blade-chest (Chen and Joachims
    2016) and generic low-rank preference (Rajkumar and Agarwal 2016) models. We
    use the technique of matrix completion in the presence of side information to
    develop the Inductive Pairwise Ranking (IPR) algorithm that provably learns a
    good ranking under the FLR model, in a sample-efficient manner. In practice,
    through systematic synthetic simulations, we confirm our theoretical findings
    regarding improvements in the sample complexity due to the use of feature
    information. Moreover, on popular real-world preference learning datasets, with
    as less as 10% sampling of the pairwise comparisons, our method recovers a good
    ranking.

    EEG Representation Using Multi-instance Framework on The Manifold of Symmetric Positive Definite Matrices for EEG-based Computer Aided Diagnosis

    Khadijeh Sadatnejad, Saeed S. Ghidary, Reza Rostami, Reza Kazemi
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    The generalization and robustness of an electroencephalogram (EEG)-based
    computer aided diagnostic system are crucial requirements in actual clinical
    practice. To reach these goals, we propose a new EEG representation that
    provides a more realistic view of brain functionality by applying
    multi-instance (MI) framework to consider the non-stationarity of the EEG
    signal. The non-stationary characteristic of EEG is considered by describing
    the signal as a bag of relevant and irrelevant concepts. The concepts are
    provided by a robust representation of homogenous segments of EEG signal using
    spatial covariance matrices. Due to the nonlinear geometry of the space of
    covariance matrices, we determine the boundaries of the homogeneous segments
    based on adaptive segmentation of the signal in a Riemannian framework. Each
    subject is described as a bag of covariance matrices of homogenous segments and
    the bag-level discriminative information is used for classification. To
    evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we examine it in attention
    deficit hyperactivity/bipolar mood disorder detection and depression/normal
    diagnosis applications. Experimental results confirm the superiority of the
    proposed approach, which is gained due to the robustness of covariance
    descriptor, the effectiveness of Riemannian geometry, and the benefits of
    considering the inherent non-stationary nature of the brain.

    Neural Causal Regularization under the Independence of Mechanisms Assumption

    Mohammad Taha Bahadori, Krzysztof Chalupka, Edward Choi, Robert Chen, Walter F. Stewart, Jimeng Sun
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Neural networks provide a powerful framework for learning the association
    between input and response variables and making accurate predictions and offer
    promise in using the rapidly growing volume of health care data to surface
    causal relationships that cannot necessarily be tested in randomized clinical
    trials. In pursuit of models whose predictive power comes maximally from causal
    variables, we propose a novel causal regularizer based on the assumption about
    independence of different steps of data generation process. We use the causal
    regularizer to steer deep neural network architectures towards
    causally-interpretable solutions. We perform a large-scale analysis of
    electronic health records. Our causally-regularized algorithm outperforms its
    L1-regularized counterpart both in predictive performance as well as causal
    relevance. Finally, we show that the proposed causal regularizer can be used
    together with representation learning algorithms to yield up to 20% improvement
    in the causality score of the generated multivariate hypotheses.

    Efficient Policy Learning

    Susan Athey, Stefan Wager
    Subjects: Statistics Theory (math.ST); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    There has been considerable interest across several fields in methods that
    reduce the problem of learning good treatment assignment policies to the
    problem of accurate policy evaluation. Given a class of candidate policies,
    these methods first effectively evaluate each policy individually, and then
    learn a policy by optimizing the estimated value function; such approaches are
    guaranteed to be risk-consistent whenever the policy value estimates are
    uniformly consistent. However, despite the wealth of proposed methods, the
    literature remains largely silent on questions of statistical efficiency: there
    are only limited results characterizing which policy evaluation strategies lead
    to better learned policies than others, or what the optimal policy evaluation
    strategies are. In this paper, we build on classical results in semiparametric
    efficiency theory to develop quasi-optimal methods for policy learning; in
    particular, we propose a class of policy value estimators that, when optimized,
    yield regret bounds for the learned policy that scale with the semiparametric
    efficient variance for policy evaluation. On a practical level, our result
    suggests new methods for policy learning motivated by semiparametric efficiency
    theory.

    Multi-feature classifiers for burst detection in single EEG channels from preterm infants

    X. Navarro, F. Porée, M. Kuchenbuch, M. Chavez, A. Beuchée, G. Carrault
    Comments: 11 pages, 5 figures. Table 1 in the last page
    Subjects: Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC); Learning (cs.LG)

    The study of electroencephalographic (EEG) bursts in preterm infants provides
    valuable information about maturation or prognostication after perinatal
    asphyxia. Over the last two decades, a number of works proposed algorithms to
    automatically detect EEG bursts in preterm infants, but they were designed for
    populations under 35 weeks of post menstrual age (PMA). However, as the brain
    activity evolves rapidly during postnatal life, these solutions might be
    under-performing with increasing PMA. In this work we focused on preterm
    infants reaching term ages (PMA (geq) 36 weeks) using multi-feature
    classification on a single EEG channel. Five EEG burst detectors relying on
    different machine learning approaches were compared: Logistic regression (LR),
    linear discriminant analysis (LDA), k-nearest neighbors (kNN), support vector
    machines (SVM) and thresholding (Th). Classifiers were trained by visually
    labeled EEG recordings from 14 very preterm infants (born after 28 weeks of
    gestation) with 36 – 41 weeks PMA. The most performing classifiers reached
    about 95\% accuracy (kNN, SVM and LR) whereas Th obtained 84\%. Compared to
    human-automatic agreements, LR provided the highest scores (Cohen’s kappa =
    0.71) and the best computational efficiency using only three EEG features.
    Applying this classifier in a test database of 21 infants (geq) 36 weeks PMA,
    we show that long EEG bursts and short inter-bust periods are characteristic of
    infants with the highest PMA and weights. In view of these results, LR-based
    burst detection could be a suitable tool to study maturation in monitoring or
    portable devices using a single EEG channel.

    Minimax Lower Bounds for Ridge Combinations Including Neural Nets

    Jason M. Klusowski, Andrew R. Barron
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)

    Estimation of functions of ( d ) variables is considered using ridge
    combinations of the form ( extstylesum_{k=1}^m c_{1,k}
    phi( extstylesum_{j=1}^d c_{0,j,k}x_j-b_k) ) where the activation function (
    phi ) is a function with bounded value and derivative. These include
    single-hidden layer neural networks, polynomials, and sinusoidal models. From a
    sample of size ( n ) of possibly noisy values at random sites ( X in B =
    [-1,1]^d ), the minimax mean square error is examined for functions in the
    closure of the ( ell_1 ) hull of ridge functions with activation ( phi ). It
    is shown to be of order ( d/n ) to a fractional power (when ( d ) is of smaller
    order than ( n )), and to be of order ( (log d)/n ) to a fractional power
    (when ( d ) is of larger order than ( n )). Dependence on constraints ( v_0 )
    and ( v_1 ) on the ( ell_1 ) norms of inner parameter ( c_0 ) and outer
    parameter ( c_1 ), respectively, is also examined. Also, lower and upper bounds
    on the fractional power are given. The heart of the analysis is development of
    information-theoretic packing numbers for these classes of functions.

    Graph Based Relational Features for Collective Classification

    Immanuel Bayer, Uwe Nagel, Steffen Rendle
    Comments: Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)

    Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) methods have shown that classification
    accuracy can be improved by integrating relations between samples. Techniques
    such as iterative classification or relaxation labeling achieve this by
    propagating information between related samples during the inference process.
    When only a few samples are labeled and connections between samples are sparse,
    collective inference methods have shown large improvements over standard
    feature-based ML methods. However, in contrast to feature based ML, collective
    inference methods require complex inference procedures and often depend on the
    strong assumption of label consistency among related samples. In this paper, we
    introduce new relational features for standard ML methods by extracting
    information from direct and indirect relations. We show empirically on three
    standard benchmark datasets that our relational features yield results
    comparable to collective inference methods. Finally we show that our proposal
    outperforms these methods when additional information is available.

    Joint Discovery of Object States and Manipulating Actions

    Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Josev Sivic, Ivan Laptev, Simon Lacoste-Julien
    Comments: 12 pages
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    Many activities involve object manipulations aiming to modify object state.
    Examples of common state changes include full/empty bottle, open/closed door,
    and attached/detached car wheel. In this work, we seek to automatically
    discover the states of objects and the associated manipulating actions. Given a
    set of videos for a particular task, we propose a joint model that learns to
    identify object states and to localize state-modifying actions. Our model is
    formulated as a discriminative clustering cost. We assume a consistent temporal
    order for the changes in object states and manipulating actions, and learn the
    model without additional supervision. Our method is validated on a new dataset
    of videos depicting real-life object manipulations. We demonstrate the
    successful discovery of seven manipulating actions and corresponding object
    states. Moreover, we emphasize our joint formulation and show the improvement
    of object state discovery by action recognition and vice versa.

    Rate Optimal Estimation and Confidence Intervals for High-dimensional Regression with Missing Covariates

    Yining Wang, Jialei Wang, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Aarti Singh
    Comments: 31 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG); Methodology (stat.ME)

    We consider the problem of estimating and constructing component-wise
    confidence intervals of a sparse high-dimensional linear regression model when
    some covariates of the design matrix are missing completely at random. A
    variant of the Dantzig selector (Candes & Tao, 2007) is analyzed for estimating
    the regression model and a de-biasing argument is employed to construct
    component-wise confidence intervals under additional assumptions on the
    covariance of the design matrix. We also derive rates of convergence of the
    mean-square estimation error and the average confidence interval length, and
    show that the dependency over several model parameters (e.g., sparsity (s),
    portion of observed covariates (
    ho_*), signal level (|eta_0|_2)) are
    optimal in a minimax sense.

    Energy Saving Additive Neural Network

    Arman Afrasiyabi, Ozan Yildiz, Baris Nasir, Fatos T. Yarman Vural, A. Enis Cetin
    Comments: 8 pages (double column), 2 figures, 1 table
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    In recent years, machine learning techniques based on neural networks for
    mobile computing become increasingly popular. Classical multi-layer neural
    networks require matrix multiplications at each stage. Multiplication operation
    is not an energy efficient operation and consequently it drains the battery of
    the mobile device. In this paper, we propose a new energy efficient neural
    network with the universal approximation property over space of Lebesgue
    integrable functions. This network, called, additive neural network, is very
    suitable for mobile computing. The neural structure is based on a novel vector
    product definition, called ef-operator, that permits a multiplier-free
    implementation. In ef-operation, the “product” of two real numbers is defined
    as the sum of their absolute values, with the sign determined by the sign of
    the product of the numbers. This “product” is used to construct a vector
    product in (R^N). The vector product induces the (l_1) norm. The proposed
    additive neural network successfully solves the XOR problem. The experiments on
    MNIST dataset show that the classification performances of the proposed
    additive neural networks are very similar to the corresponding multi-layer
    perceptron and convolutional neural networks (LeNet).

    Character-level Deep Conflation for Business Data Analytics

    Zhe Gan, P. D. Singh, Ameet Joshi, Xiaodong He, Jianshu Chen, Jianfeng Gao, Li Deng
    Comments: Accepted for publication, at ICASSP 2017
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    Connecting different text attributes associated with the same entity
    (conflation) is important in business data analytics since it could help merge
    two different tables in a database to provide a more comprehensive profile of
    an entity. However, the conflation task is challenging because two text strings
    that describe the same entity could be quite different from each other for
    reasons such as misspelling. It is therefore critical to develop a conflation
    model that is able to truly understand the semantic meaning of the strings and
    match them at the semantic level. To this end, we develop a character-level
    deep conflation model that encodes the input text strings from character level
    into finite dimension feature vectors, which are then used to compute the
    cosine similarity between the text strings. The model is trained in an
    end-to-end manner using back propagation and stochastic gradient descent to
    maximize the likelihood of the correct association. Specifically, we propose
    two variants of the deep conflation model, based on long-short-term memory
    (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN),
    respectively. Both models perform well on a real-world business analytics
    dataset and significantly outperform the baseline bag-of-character (BoC) model.


    Information Theory

    Sparse Approximation by Semidefinite Programming

    Ali Çivril
    Comments: 12 pages
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS)

    The problem of sparse approximation and the closely related compressed
    sensing have received tremendous attention in the past decade. Primarily
    studied from the viewpoint of applied harmonic analysis and signal processing,
    there have been two dominant algorithmic approaches to this problem: Greedy
    methods called the matching pursuit (MP) and the linear programming based
    approaches called the basis pursuit (BP). The aim of the current paper is to
    bring a fresh perspective to sparse approximation by treating it as a
    combinatorial optimization problem and providing an algorithm based on the
    powerful optimization technique semidefinite programming (SDP). In particular,
    we show that there is a randomized algorithm based on a semidefinite relaxation
    of the problem with performance guarantees depending on the coherence and the
    restricted isometry constant of the dictionary used. We then show a
    derandomization of the algorithm based on the method of conditional
    probabilities.

    Decoding Delay Performance of Random Linear Network Coding for Broadcast

    Ioannis Chatzigeorgiou, Andrea Tassi
    Comments: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)

    Characterization of the delay profile of systems employing random linear
    network coding is important for the reliable provision of broadcast services.
    Previous studies focused on network coding over large finite fields or
    developed Markov chains to model the delay distribution but did not look at the
    effect of transmission deadlines on the delay. In this work, we consider
    generations of source packets that are encoded and transmitted over the erasure
    broadcast channel. The transmission of packets associated to a generation is
    taken to be deadline-constrained, that is, the transmitter drops a generation
    and proceeds to the next one when a predetermined deadline expires. Closed-form
    expressions for the average number of required packet transmissions per
    generation are obtained in terms of the generation size, the field size, the
    erasure probability and the deadline choice. An upper bound on the average
    decoding delay, which is tighter than previous bounds found in the literature,
    is also derived. Analysis shows that the proposed framework can be used to
    fine-tune the system parameters and ascertain that neither insufficient nor
    excessive amounts of packets are sent over the broadcast channel.

    Construction of Unrestricted Rate Parallel Random Input Output Code

    Shan Lu, Horoshi Kamabe, Jun Cheng, Akira Yamawaki
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    A coding scheme for two-page unrestricted-rate PRIO code that each page may
    have different code rates is proposed. In the second page, the code for each
    messages consists of two complementary codewords with code length n. There are
    a total of 2n-1 codes which are disjoint to guarantees uniquely decodable for
    2n-1 messages. In the first page, the code for each message consists of all
    weight-u vectors with their non-zero elements restricted to (2u-1) same
    positions, where non-negative integer u is less than or equal to half of code
    length. Finding codes to be disjoint in first page is equivalent to
    construction of constant-weight codes, and the numbers of disjoint codes are
    the best-known numbers of codewords in constant-weight codes. Our coding scheme
    is constructive, and the code length is arbitrary.The sum rates of our proposed
    codes are higher than those of previous work.

    Wideband Distributed Spectrum Sharing with Multichannel Immediate Multiple Access

    Mingming Cai, J. Nicholas Laneman
    Comments: 16 pages, to be published in Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This paper describes a radio architecture for distributed spectrum sharing of
    multiple channels among secondary users (SUs) in a wide band of frequencies and
    a localized area. A novel Multichannel Immediate Multiple Access (MIMA)
    physical layer is developed such that each SU can monitor all the channels
    simultaneously for incoming signals and achieve fast rendezvous within the
    multiple channels. The spectrum utilized by an SU pair can be changed
    dynamically based upon spectrum sensing at the transmitter and tracking
    synchronization and control messages at the receiver. Although information
    about the number of active SUs can be used to improve the spectrum sharing
    efficiency, the improvement is small relative to the cost of obtaining such
    information. Therefore, the architecture adopts Multichannel Carrier Sense
    Multiple Access (CSMA) for medium access control regardless of the number of
    active SUs. A prototype implementation of the architecture has been developed
    using an advanced software defined radio (SDR) platform. System tests
    demonstrate that the spectrum sharing efficiency of the prototype is close to
    an upper bound if the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is sufficiently high. Among
    other practical issues, imaged interference caused by hardware IQ imbalance
    limits system performance. In the prototype, the MIMA is based on an LTE
    waveform. Therefore, the spectrum sharing radio can be potentially applied to
    the 3.5 GHz radar band for Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS).

    A New View of Multi-User Hybrid Massive MIMO: Angle Division Multiple Access

    Hai Lin, Feifei Gao, Shi Jin, Geoffrey Ye Li
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This paper introduces a new view of multi-user (MU) hybrid massive
    multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems from array signal processing
    perspective. We analyze a time division duplex massive MIMO system where the
    base station (BS) is equipped with a uniform linear array and each user has a
    single antenna, and show that the instantaneous channel vectors corresponding
    to different users are asymptotically orthogonal as the number of antennas at
    the BS goes large when the angles of arrival (AOAs) of users are different.
    Applying the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), the cosine of AOA can be
    estimated with a resolution inverse proportional to the number of antenna at
    the BS, and this resolution can be enhanced via zero padding technique with
    fast Fourier transform (FFT). We then decompose the channel matrix into an
    angle domain basis matrix and the corresponding channel matrix. The former can
    be formulated by steering vectors and the latter has the same size as the
    number of RF chains, which perfectly matches the structure of hybrid precoding.
    Hence, the MU massive MIMO system with the proposed hybrid precoding can be
    viewed as angle division multiple access (ADMA), either orthogonal or
    non-orthogonal, to simultaneously serve multiple users at the same frequency
    band. Based on the new view of hybrid massive MIMO, a novel hybrid channel
    estimation is designed and can save much overhead compared to the conventional
    beam cycling method. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is
    validated by computer simulation results.

    Combinatorial Alphabet-Dependent Bounds for Locally Recoverable Codes

    Abhishek Agarwal, Alexander Barg, Sihuang Hu, Arya Mazumdar, Itzhak Tamo
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM)

    Locally recoverable codes (LRC) have recently been a subject of intense
    research due to the theoretical appeal and their applications in distributed
    storage systems. In an LRC, any erased symbol of a codeword can be recovered by
    accessing only few other symbols. For LRC codes over small alphabet (such as
    binary), the optimal rate-distance trade-off is unknown. We present several new
    combinatorial bounds on LRC codes including the locality-aware sphere packing
    and Plotkin bounds. We also develop an approach to linear programming (LP)
    bounds on LRC codes. The resulting LP bound gives better estimates in examples
    than the other upper bounds known in the literature. Further, we provide the
    tightest known upper bound on the rate of linear LRC codes with a given
    relative distance, an improvement over the previous best known bounds.

    Capacity Region of Gaussian Multiple-Access Channels with Energy Harvesting and Energy Cooperation

    Yunquan Dong, Zhengchuan Chen, Pingyi Fan
    Comments: 9 pages, accepted by IEEE Access
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    We consider the capacity region of a (K)-user multiple access channel (MAC)
    with energy harvesting transmitters. Each user stores and schedules the
    randomly arriving energy using an energy buffer. Users can also perform energy
    cooperation by transmitting energy to other users or receiving energy from
    them. We derive the capacity region of this channel and show that 1) the
    capacity region coincides with that of a traditional (K)-user Gaussian MAC with
    energy cooperation, where the average power constraints are equal to the
    battery recharging rates of the energy harvesting case; 2) each rate on the
    capacity region boundary can be achieved using the save-and-forward power
    control and a fixed energy cooperation policy.

    On the Local Correctabilities of Projective Reed-Muller Codes

    Sian-Jheng Lin
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper, we show that the projective Reed-Muller~(PRM) codes form a
    family of locally correctable codes~(LCC) in the regime of low query
    complexities. A PRM code is specified by the alphabet size (q), the number of
    variables (m), and the degree (d). When (dleq q-1), we present a perfectly
    smooth local decoder to recover a symbol by accessing (gammaleq q) symbols to
    the coordinates fall on a line. There are three major parameters considered in
    LCCs, namely the query complexity, the message length and the code length. This
    paper shows that PRM codes are shorter than generalized Reed-Muller~(GRM) codes
    in LCCs. Precisely, given a GRM code over a field of size (q), there exists a
    class of shorter codes over a field of size (q-1), while maintaining the same
    values on the query complexities and the message lengths.

    On minimum distance of locally repairable codes

    Mehrtash Mehrabi, Massoud Ardakani
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Distributed and cloud storage systems are used to reliably store large-scale
    data. Erasure codes have been recently proposed and used in real-world
    distributed and cloud storage systems such as Google File System, Microsoft
    Azure Storage, and Facebook HDFS-RAID, to enhance the reliability. In order to
    decrease the repair bandwidth and disk I/O, a class of erasure codes called
    locally repairable codes (LRCs) have been proposed which have small locality
    compare to other erasure codes. Although LRCs have small locality, they have
    lower minimum distance compare to the Singleton bound. Hence, seeking the
    largest possible minimum distance for LRCs have been the topic of many recent
    studies. In this paper, we study the largest possible minimum distance of a
    class of LRCs and evaluate them in terms of achievability. Furthermore, we
    compare our results with the existence bounds in the literature.

    Precoding for the Sparsely Spread MC-CDMA Downlink with Discrete-Alphabet Inputs

    Min Li, Chunshan Liu, Stephen V. Hanly
    Comments: Author final manuscript (accepted and to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, March 2016.)
    Journal-ref: IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. PP, no. 99, pp.
    1-1 (2016)
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Sparse signatures have been proposed for the CDMA uplink to reduce multi-user
    detection complexity, but they have not yet been fully exploited for its
    downlink counterpart. In this work, we propose a Multi-Carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA)
    downlink communication, where regular sparse signatures are deployed in the
    frequency domain. Taking the symbol detection point of view, we formulate a
    problem appropriate for the downlink with discrete alphabets as inputs. The
    solution to the problem provides a power-efficient precoding algorithm for the
    base station, subject to minimum symbol error probability (SEP) requirements at
    the mobile stations. In the algorithm, signature sparsity is shown to be
    crucial for reducing precoding complexity. Numerical results confirm
    system-load-dependent power reduction gain from the proposed precoding over the
    zero-forcing precoding and the regularized zero-forcing precoding with
    optimized regularization parameter under the same SEP targets. For a fixed
    system load, it is also demonstrated that sparse MC-CDMA with a proper choice
    of sparsity level attains almost the same power efficiency and link throughput
    as that of dense MC-CDMA yet with reduced precoding complexity, thanks to the
    sparse signatures.

    A Generalization of Permanent Inequalities and Applications in Counting and Optimization

    Nima Anari, Shayan Oveis Gharan
    Subjects: Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS); Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM); Information Theory (cs.IT); Combinatorics (math.CO); Probability (math.PR)

    A polynomial (pinmathbb{R}[z_1,dots,z_n]) is real stable if it has no
    roots in the upper-half complex plane. Gurvits’s permanent inequality gives a
    lower bound on the coefficient of the (z_1z_2dots z_n) monomial of a real
    stable polynomial (p) with nonnegative coefficients. This fundamental
    inequality has been used to attack several counting and optimization problems.

    Here, we study a more general question: Given a stable multilinear polynomial
    (p) with nonnegative coefficients and a set of monomials (S), we show that if
    the polynomial obtained by summing up all monomials in (S) is real stable, then
    we can lowerbound the sum of coefficients of monomials of (p) that are in (S).
    We also prove generalizations of this theorem to (real stable) polynomials that
    are not multilinear. We use our theorem to give a new proof of Schrijver’s
    inequality on the number of perfect matchings of a regular bipartite graph,
    generalize a recent result of Nikolov and Singh, and give deterministic
    polynomial time approximation algorithms for several counting problems.

    Sparse Approximation is Provably Hard under Coherent Dictionaries

    Ali Çivril
    Comments: 18 pages, 5 figures
    Journal-ref: J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 84: 32-43 (2017)
    Subjects: Computational Complexity (cs.CC); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    It is well known that sparse approximation problem is extsf{NP}-hard under
    general dictionaries. Several algorithms have been devised and analyzed in the
    past decade under various assumptions on the emph{coherence} (mu) of the
    dictionary represented by an (M imes N) matrix from which a subset of (k)
    column vectors is selected. All these results assume (mu=O(k^{-1})). This
    article is an attempt to bridge the big gap between the negative result of
    extsf{NP}-hardness under general dictionaries and the positive results under
    this restrictive assumption. In particular, it suggests that the aforementioned
    assumption might be asymptotically the best one can make to arrive at any
    efficient algorithmic result under well-known conjectures of complexity theory.
    In establishing the results, we make use of a new simple multilayered PCP which
    is tailored to give a matrix with small coherence combined with our reduction.

    Inductive Pairwise Ranking: Going Beyond the n log(n) Barrier

    U.N. Niranjan, Arun Rajkumar
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Information Theory (cs.IT); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We study the problem of ranking a set of items from nonactively chosen
    pairwise preferences where each item has feature information with it. We
    propose and characterize a very broad class of preference matrices giving rise
    to the Feature Low Rank (FLR) model, which subsumes several models ranging from
    the classic Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) (Bradley and Terry 1952) and Thurstone
    (Thurstone 1927) models to the recently proposed blade-chest (Chen and Joachims
    2016) and generic low-rank preference (Rajkumar and Agarwal 2016) models. We
    use the technique of matrix completion in the presence of side information to
    develop the Inductive Pairwise Ranking (IPR) algorithm that provably learns a
    good ranking under the FLR model, in a sample-efficient manner. In practice,
    through systematic synthetic simulations, we confirm our theoretical findings
    regarding improvements in the sample complexity due to the use of feature
    information. Moreover, on popular real-world preference learning datasets, with
    as less as 10% sampling of the pairwise comparisons, our method recovers a good
    ranking.

    Fidelity Lower Bounds for Stabilizer and CSS Quantum Codes

    Alexei Ashikhmin
    Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper we estimate the fidelity of stabilizer and CSS codes. First, we
    derive a lower bound on the fidelity of a stabilizer code via its quantum
    enumerator. Next, we find the average quantum enumerators of the ensembles of
    finite length stabilizer and CSS codes. We use the average quantum enumerators
    for obtaining lower bounds on the average fidelity of these ensembles. We
    further improve the fidelity bounds by estimating the quantum enumerators of
    expurgated ensembles of stabilizer and CSS codes. Finally, we derive fidelity
    bounds in the asymptotic regime when the code length tends to infinity.

    These results tell us which code rate we can afford for achieving a target
    fidelity with codes of a given length. The results also show that in symmetric
    depolarizing channel a typical stabilizer code has better performance, in terms
    of fidelity and code rate, compared with a typical CSS codes, and that balanced
    CSS codes significantly outperform other CSS codes. Asymptotic results
    demonstrate that CSS codes have a fundamental performance loss compared to
    stabilizer codes.




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