Affective computing with Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a challenging task that requires cumbersome models to effectively learn the information contained in large-scale EEG signals, causing difficulties for real-time smart-device deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge distillation pipeline to distill EEG representations via capsule-based architectures for both classification and regression tasks. Our goal is to distill information from a heavy model to a lightweight model for subject-specific tasks. To this end, we first pre-train a large model (teacher network) on large number of training samples. Then, we employ the teacher network to learn the discriminative features embedded in capsules by adopting a lightweight model (student network) to mimic the teacher using the privileged knowledge. Such privileged information learned by the teacher contain similarities among capsules and are only available during the training stage of the student network. We evaluate the proposed architecture on two large-scale public EEG datasets, showing that our framework consistently enables student networks with different compression ratios to effectively learn from the teacher, even when provided with limited training samples. Lastly, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on one of the two datasets.
A Forster transform is an operation that turns a distribution into one with good anti-concentration properties. While a Forster transform does not always exist, we show that any distribution can be efficiently decomposed as a disjoint mixture of few distributions for which a Forster transform exists and can be computed efficiently. As the main application of this result, we obtain the first polynomial-time algorithm for distribution-independent PAC learning of halfspaces in the Massart noise model with strongly polynomial sample complexity, i.e., independent of the bit complexity of the examples. Previous algorithms for this learning problem incurred sample complexity scaling polynomially with the bit complexity, even though such a dependence is not information-theoretically necessary.
This paper develops a reinforcement learning (RL) scheme for adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC), called "CVLight", that leverages data collected only from connected vehicles (CV). Seven types of RL models are proposed within this scheme that contain various state and reward representations, including incorporation of CV delay and green light duration into state and the usage of CV delay as reward. To further incorporate information of both CV and non-CV into CVLight, an algorithm based on actor-critic, A2C-Full, is proposed where both CV and non-CV information is used to train the critic network, while only CV information is used to update the policy network and execute optimal signal timing. These models are compared at an isolated intersection under various CV market penetration rates. A full model with the best performance (i.e., minimum average travel delay per vehicle) is then selected and applied to compare with state-of-the-art benchmarks under different levels of traffic demands, turning proportions, and dynamic traffic demands, respectively. Two case studies are performed on an isolated intersection and a corridor with three consecutive intersections located in Manhattan, New York, to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm under real-world scenarios. Compared to other baseline models that use all vehicle information, the trained CVLight agent can efficiently control multiple intersections solely based on CV data and can achieve a similar or even greater performance when the CV penetration rate is no less than 20%.
Existing studies on disease diagnostic models focus either on diagnostic model learning for performance improvement or on the visual explanation of a trained diagnostic model. We propose a novel learn-explain-reinforce (LEAR) framework that unifies diagnostic model learning, visual explanation generation (explanation unit), and trained diagnostic model reinforcement (reinforcement unit) guided by the visual explanation. For the visual explanation, we generate a counterfactual map that transforms an input sample to be identified as an intended target label. For example, a counterfactual map can localize hypothetical abnormalities within a normal brain image that may cause it to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD). We believe that the generated counterfactual maps represent data-driven and model-induced knowledge about a target task, i.e., AD diagnosis using structural MRI, which can be a vital source of information to reinforce the generalization of the trained diagnostic model. To this end, we devise an attention-based feature refinement module with the guidance of the counterfactual maps. The explanation and reinforcement units are reciprocal and can be operated iteratively. Our proposed approach was validated via qualitative and quantitative analysis on the ADNI dataset. Its comprehensibility and fidelity were demonstrated through ablation studies and comparisons with existing methods.
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) provide a principled online learning approach to attain the balance between exploration and exploitation.Due to the superior performance and low feedback learning without the learning to act in multiple situations, Multi-armed Bandits drawing widespread attention in applications ranging such as recommender systems. Likewise, within the recommender system, collaborative filtering (CF) is arguably the earliest and most influential method in the recommender system. Crucially, new users and an ever-changing pool of recommended items are the challenges that recommender systems need to address. For collaborative filtering, the classical method is training the model offline, then perform the online testing, but this approach can no longer handle the dynamic changes in user preferences which is the so-called \textit{cold start}. So how to effectively recommend items to users in the absence of effective information? To address the aforementioned problems, a multi-armed bandit based collaborative filtering recommender system has been proposed, named BanditMF. BanditMF is designed to address two challenges in the multi-armed bandits algorithm and collaborative filtering: (1) how to solve the cold start problem for collaborative filtering under the condition of scarcity of valid information, (2) how to solve the sub-optimal problem of bandit algorithms in strong social relations domains caused by independently estimating unknown parameters associated with each user and ignoring correlations between users.
Due to its high spatial and spectral information content, hyperspectral imaging opens up new possibilities for a better understanding of data and scenes in a wide variety of applications. An essential part of this process of understanding is the classification part. In this article we present a general classification approach based on the shape of spectral signatures. In contrast to classical classification approaches (e.g. SVM, KNN), not only reflectance values are considered, but also parameters such as curvature points, curvature values, and the curvature behavior of spectral signatures are used to develop shape-describing rules in order to use them for classification by a rule-based procedure using IF-THEN queries. The flexibility and efficiency of the methodology is demonstrated using datasets from two different application fields and leads to convincing results with good performance.
An important research direction in automatic speech recognition (ASR) has centered around the development of effective methods to rerank the output hypotheses of an ASR system with more sophisticated language models (LMs) for further gains. A current mainstream school of thoughts for ASR N-best hypothesis reranking is to employ a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based LM or its variants, with performance superiority over the conventional n-gram LMs across a range of ASR tasks. In real scenarios such as a long conversation, a sequence of consecutive sentences may jointly contain ample cues of conversation-level information such as topical coherence, lexical entrainment and adjacency pairs, which however remains to be underexplored. In view of this, we first formulate ASR N-best reranking as a prediction problem, putting forward an effective cross-sentence neural LM approach that reranks the ASR N-best hypotheses of an upcoming sentence by taking into consideration the word usage in its precedent sentences. Furthermore, we also explore to extract task-specific global topical information of the cross-sentence history in an unsupervised manner for better ASR performance. Extensive experiments conducted on the AMI conversational benchmark corpus indicate the effectiveness and feasibility of our methods in comparison to several state-of-the-art reranking methods.
The violation of a Bell inequality is the paradigmatic example of device-independent quantum information: the nonclassicality of the data is certified without the knowledge of the functioning of devices. In practice, however, all Bell experiments rely on the precise understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms. Given that, it is natural to ask: Can one witness nonclassical behaviour in a truly black-box scenario? Here we propose and implement, computationally and experimentally, a solution to this ab-initio task. It exploits a robust automated optimization approach based on the Stochastic Nelder-Mead algorithm. Treating preparation and measurement devices as black-boxes, and relying on the observed statistics only, our adaptive protocol approaches the optimal Bell inequality violation after a limited number of iterations for a variety photonic states, measurement responses and Bell scenarios. In particular, we exploit it for randomness certification from unknown states and measurements. Our results demonstrate the power of automated algorithms, opening a new venue for the experimental implementation of device-independent quantum technologies.
Although modern object detection and classification models achieve high accuracy, these are typically constrained in advance on a fixed train set and are therefore not flexible to deal with novel, unseen object categories. Moreover, these models most often operate on a single frame, which may yield incorrect classifications in case of ambiguous viewpoints. In this paper, we propose an active inference agent that actively gathers evidence for object classifications, and can learn novel object categories over time. Drawing inspiration from the human brain, we build object-centric generative models composed of two information streams, a what- and a where-stream. The what-stream predicts whether the observed object belongs to a specific category, while the where-stream is responsible for representing the object in its internal 3D reference frame. We show that our agent (i) is able to learn representations for many object categories in an unsupervised way, (ii) achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracies, actively resolving ambiguity when required and (iii) identifies novel object categories. Furthermore, we validate our system in an end-to-end fashion where the agent is able to search for an object at a given pose from a pixel-based rendering. We believe that this is a first step towards building modular, intelligent systems that can be used for a wide range of tasks involving three dimensional objects.
Most existing video-and-language (VidL) research focuses on a single dataset, or multiple datasets of a single task. In reality, a truly useful VidL system is expected to be easily generalizable to diverse tasks, domains, and datasets. To facilitate the evaluation of such systems, we introduce Video-And-Language Understanding Evaluation (VALUE) benchmark, an assemblage of 11 VidL datasets over 3 popular tasks: (i) text-to-video retrieval; (ii) video question answering; and (iii) video captioning. VALUE benchmark aims to cover a broad range of video genres, video lengths, data volumes, and task difficulty levels. Rather than focusing on single-channel videos with visual information only, VALUE promotes models that leverage information from both video frames and their associated subtitles, as well as models that share knowledge across multiple tasks. We evaluate various baseline methods with and without large-scale VidL pre-training, and systematically investigate the impact of video input channels, fusion methods, and different video representations. We also study the transferability between tasks, and conduct multi-task learning under different settings. The significant gap between our best model and human performance calls for future study for advanced VidL models. VALUE is available at https://value-leaderboard.github.io/.