Drug-Target Interaction Prediction with Graph Attention networks

Motivation: Predicting Drug-Target Interaction (DTI) is a well-studied topic in bioinformatics due to its relevance in the fields of proteomics and pharmaceutical research. Although many machine learning methods have been successfully applied in this task, few of them aim at leveraging the inherent heterogeneous graph structure in the DTI network to address the challenge. For better learning and interpreting the DTI topological structure and the similarity, it is desirable to have methods specifically for predicting interactions from the graph structure. Results: We present an end-to-end framework, DTI-GAT (Drug-Target Interaction prediction with Graph Attention networks) for DTI predictions. DTI-GAT incorporates a deep neural network architecture that operates on graph-structured data with the attention mechanism, which leverages both the interaction patterns and the features of drug and protein sequences. DTI-GAT facilitates the interpretation of the DTI topological structure by assigning different attention weights to each node with the self-attention mechanism. Experimental evaluations show that DTI-GAT outperforms various state-of-the-art systems on the binary DTI prediction problem. Moreover, the independent study results further demonstrate that our model can be generalized better than other conventional methods. Availability: The source code and all datasets are available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/DTI-GRAPH

Collaborative Visual Navigation

As a fundamental problem for Artificial Intelligence, multi-agent system (MAS) is making rapid progress, mainly driven by multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques. However, previous MARL methods largely focused on grid-world like or game environments; MAS in visually rich environments has remained less explored. To narrow this gap and emphasize the crucial role of perception in MAS, we propose a large-scale 3D dataset, CollaVN, for multi-agent visual navigation (MAVN). In CollaVN, multiple agents are entailed to cooperatively navigate across photo-realistic environments to reach target locations. Diverse MAVN variants are explored to make our problem more general. Moreover, a memory-augmented communication framework is proposed. Each agent is equipped with a private, external memory to persistently store communication information. This allows agents to make better use of their past communication information, enabling more efficient collaboration and robust long-term planning. In our experiments, several baselines and evaluation metrics are designed. We also empirically verify the efficacy of our proposed MARL approach across different MAVN task settings.

Anomaly Detection of Time Series with Smoothness-Inducing Sequential Variational Auto-Encoder

Deep generative models have demonstrated their effectiveness in learning latent representation and modeling complex dependencies of time series. In this paper, we present a Smoothness-Inducing Sequential Variational Auto-Encoder (SISVAE) model for robust estimation and anomaly detection of multi-dimensional time series. Our model is based on Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE), and its backbone is fulfilled by a Recurrent Neural Network to capture latent temporal structures of time series for both generative model and inference model. Specifically, our model parameterizes mean and variance for each time-stamp with flexible neural networks, resulting in a non-stationary model that can work without the assumption of constant noise as commonly made by existing Markov models. However, such a flexibility may cause the model fragile to anomalies. To achieve robust density estimation which can also benefit detection tasks, we propose a smoothness-inducing prior over possible estimations. The proposed prior works as a regularizer that places penalty at non-smooth reconstructions. Our model is learned efficiently with a novel stochastic gradient variational Bayes estimator. In particular, we study two decision criteria for anomaly detection: reconstruction probability and reconstruction error. We show the effectiveness of our model on both synthetic datasets and public real-world benchmarks.

Explicit Shape Encoding for Real-Time Instance Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel top-down instance segmentation framework based on explicit shape encoding, named \textbf{ESE-Seg}. It largely reduces the computational consumption of the instance segmentation by explicitly decoding the multiple object shapes with tensor operations, thus performs the instance segmentation at almost the same speed as the object detection. ESE-Seg is based on a novel shape signature Inner-center Radius (IR), Chebyshev polynomial fitting and the strong modern object detectors. ESE-Seg with YOLOv3 outperforms the Mask R-CNN on Pascal VOC 2012 at mAP$^r$@0.5 while 7 times faster.

Visual Rhythm Prediction with Feature-Aligning Network

In this paper, we propose a data-driven visual rhythm prediction method, which overcomes the previous works' deficiency that predictions are made primarily by human-crafted hard rules. In our approach, we first extract features including original frames and their residuals, optical flow, scene change, and body pose. These visual features will be next taken into an end-to-end neural network as inputs. Here we observe that there are some slight misaligning between features over the timeline and assume that this is due to the distinctions between how different features are computed. To solve this problem, the extracted features are aligned by an elaborately designed layer, which can also be applied to other models suffering from mismatched features, and boost performance. Then these aligned features are fed into sequence labeling layers implemented with BiLSTM and CRF to predict the onsets. Due to the lack of existing public training and evaluation set, we experiment on a dataset constructed by ourselves based on professionally edited Music Videos (MVs), and the F1 score of our approach reaches 79.6.

Dense Adaptive Cascade Forest: A Self Adaptive Deep Ensemble for Classification Problems

Recent research has shown that deep ensemble for forest can achieve a huge increase in classification accuracy compared with the general ensemble learning method. Especially when there are only few training data. In this paper, we decide to take full advantage of this observation and introduce the Dense Adaptive Cascade Forest (daForest), which has better performance than the original one named Cascade Forest. And it is particularly noteworthy that daForest has a powerful ability to handle high-dimensional sparse data without any preprocessing on raw data like PCA or any other dimensional reduction methods. Our model is distinguished by three major features: the first feature is the combination of the SAMME.R boosting algorithm in the model, boosting gives the model the ability to continuously improve as the number of layer increases, which is not possible in stacking model or plain cascade forest. The second feature is our model connects each layer to its subsequent layers in a feed-forward fashion, to some extent this structure enhances the ability of the model to resist degeneration. When number of layers goes up, accuracy of model goes up a little in the first few layers then drop down quickly, we call this phenomenon degeneration in training stacking model. The third feature is that we add a hyper-parameter optimization layer before the first classification layer in the proposed deep model, which can search for the optimal hyper-parameter and set up the model in a brief period and nearly halve the training time without having too much impact on the final performance. Experimental results show that daForest performs particularly well on both high-dimensional low-order features and low-dimensional high-order features, and in some cases, even better than neural networks and achieves state-of-the-art results.

OMNIRank: Risk Quantification for P2P Platforms with Deep Learning

P2P lending presents as an innovative and flexible alternative for conventional lending institutions like banks, where lenders and borrowers directly make transactions and benefit each other without complicated verifications. However, due to lack of specialized laws, delegated monitoring and effective managements, P2P platforms may spawn potential risks, such as withdraw failures, investigation involvements and even runaway bosses, which cause great losses to lenders and are especially serious and notorious in China. Although there are abundant public information and data available on the Internet related to P2P platforms, challenges of multi-sourcing and heterogeneity matter. In this paper, we promote a novel deep learning model, OMNIRank, which comprehends multi-dimensional features of P2P platforms for risk quantification and produces scores for ranking. We first construct a large-scale flexible crawling framework and obtain great amounts of multi-source heterogeneous data of domestic P2P platforms since 2007 from the Internet. Purifications like duplication and noise removal, null handing, format unification and fusion are applied to improve data qualities. Then we extract deep features of P2P platforms via text comprehension, topic modeling, knowledge graph and sentiment analysis, which are delivered as inputs to OMNIRank, a deep learning model for risk quantification of P2P platforms. Finally, according to rankings generated by OMNIRank, we conduct flourish data visualizations and interactions, providing lenders with comprehensive information supports, decision suggestions and safety guarantees.