The Federal Reserve System (the Fed) plays a significant role in affecting monetary policy and financial conditions worldwide. Although it is important to analyse the Fed's communications to extract useful information, it is generally long-form and complex due to the ambiguous and esoteric nature of content. In this paper, we present FedNLP, an interpretable multi-component Natural Language Processing system to decode Federal Reserve communications. This system is designed for end-users to explore how NLP techniques can assist their holistic understanding of the Fed's communications with NO coding. Behind the scenes, FedNLP uses multiple NLP models from traditional machine learning algorithms to deep neural network architectures in each downstream task. The demonstration shows multiple results at once including sentiment analysis, summary of the document, prediction of the Federal Funds Rate movement and visualization for interpreting the prediction model's result.
Human vision is often adversely affected by complex environmental factors, especially in night vision scenarios. Thus, infrared cameras are often leveraged to help enhance the visual effects via detecting infrared radiation in the surrounding environment, but the infrared videos are undesirable due to the lack of detailed semantic information. In such a case, an effective video-to-video translation method from the infrared domain to the visible light counterpart is strongly needed by overcoming the intrinsic huge gap between infrared and visible fields. To address this challenging problem, we propose an infrared-to-visible (I2V) video translation method I2V-GAN to generate fine-grained and spatial-temporal consistent visible light videos by given unpaired infrared videos. Technically, our model capitalizes on three types of constraints: 1)adversarial constraint to generate synthetic frames that are similar to the real ones, 2)cyclic consistency with the introduced perceptual loss for effective content conversion as well as style preservation, and 3)similarity constraints across and within domains to enhance the content and motion consistency in both spatial and temporal spaces at a fine-grained level. Furthermore, the current public available infrared and visible light datasets are mainly used for object detection or tracking, and some are composed of discontinuous images which are not suitable for video tasks. Thus, we provide a new dataset for I2V video translation, which is named IRVI. Specifically, it has 12 consecutive video clips of vehicle and monitoring scenes, and both infrared and visible light videos could be apart into 24352 frames. Comprehensive experiments validate that I2V-GAN is superior to the compared SOTA methods in the translation of I2V videos with higher fluency and finer semantic details. The code and IRVI dataset are available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/I2V-GAN.
A leader-follower framework is proposed for multi-robot navigation of large scale teams where the leader agents corral the follower agents. A group of leaders is modeled as a 2D deformable object where discrete masses (i.e., leader robots) are interconnected by springs and dampers. A time-varying domain is defined by the positions of leaders while the external forces induce deformations of the domain from its nominal configuration. The team of followers is performing coverage over the time-varying domain by employing a perspective transformation that maps between the nominal and deformed configurations. A decentralized control strategy is proposed where a leader only takes local sensing information and information about its neighbors (connected by virtual springs and dampers), and a follower only needs partial information about leaders and information about its Delaunay neighbors.
Discourse relations among arguments reveal logical structures of a debate conversation. However, no prior work has explicitly studied how the sequence of discourse relations influence a claim's impact. This paper empirically shows that the discourse relations between two arguments along the context path are essential factors for identifying the persuasive power of an argument. We further propose DisCOC to inject and fuse the sentence-level structural discourse information with contextualized features derived from large-scale language models. Experimental results and extensive analysis show that the attention and gate mechanisms that explicitly model contexts and texts can indeed help the argument impact classification task defined by Durmus et al. (2019), and discourse structures among the context path of the claim to be classified can further boost the performance.
Federated Learning (FL) is a collaborative scheme to train a learning model across multiple participants without sharing data. While FL is a clear step forward towards enforcing users' privacy, different inference attacks have been developed. In this paper, we quantify the utility and privacy trade-off of a FL scheme using private personalized layers. While this scheme has been proposed as local adaptation to improve the accuracy of the model through local personalization, it has also the advantage to minimize the information about the model exchanged with the server. However, the privacy of such a scheme has never been quantified. Our evaluations using motion sensor dataset show that personalized layers speed up the convergence of the model and slightly improve the accuracy for all users compared to a standard FL scheme while better preventing both attribute and membership inferences compared to a FL scheme using local differential privacy.
State-of-the-art driver-assist systems have failed to effectively mitigate driver inattention and had minimal impacts on the ever-growing number of road mishaps (e.g. life loss, physical injuries due to accidents caused by various factors that lead to driver inattention). This is because traditional human-machine interaction settings are modeled in classical and behavioral game-theoretic domains which are technically appropriate to characterize strategic interaction between either two utility maximizing agents, or human decision makers. Therefore, in an attempt to improve the persuasive effectiveness of driver-assist systems, we develop a novel strategic and personalized driver-assist system which adapts to the driver's mental state and choice behavior. First, we propose a novel equilibrium notion in human-system interaction games, where the system maximizes its expected utility and human decisions can be characterized using any general decision model. Then we use this novel equilibrium notion to investigate the strategic driver-vehicle interaction game where the car presents a persuasive recommendation to steer the driver towards safer driving decisions. We assume that the driver employs an open-quantum system cognition model, which captures complex aspects of human decision making such as violations to classical law of total probability and incompatibility of certain mental representations of information. We present closed-form expressions for players' final responses to each other's strategies so that we can numerically compute both pure and mixed equilibria. Numerical results are presented to illustrate both kinds of equilibria.
At present, attention mechanism has been widely applied to the fields of deep learning models. Structural models that based on attention mechanism can not only record the relationships between features position, but also can measure the importance of different features based on their weights. By establishing dynamically weighted parameters for choosing relevant and irrelevant features, the key information can be strengthened, and the irrelevant information can be weakened. Therefore, the efficiency of deep learning algorithms can be significantly elevated and improved. Although transformers have been performed very well in many fields including reinforcement learning, there are still many problems and applications can be solved and made with transformers within this area. MARL (known as Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning) can be recognized as a set of independent agents trying to adapt and learn through their way to reach the goal. In order to emphasize the relationship between each MDP decision in a certain time period, we applied the hierarchical coding method and validated the effectiveness of this method. This paper proposed a hierarchical transformers MADDPG based on RNN which we call it Hierarchical RNNs-Based Transformers MADDPG(HRTMADDPG). It consists of a lower level encoder based on RNNs that encodes multiple step sizes in each time sequence, and it also consists of an upper sequence level encoder based on transformer for learning the correlations between multiple sequences so that we can capture the causal relationship between sub-time sequences and make HRTMADDPG more efficient.
The remarkable success in face forgery techniques has received considerable attention in computer vision due to security concerns. We observe that up-sampling is a necessary step of most face forgery techniques, and cumulative up-sampling will result in obvious changes in the frequency domain, especially in the phase spectrum. According to the property of natural images, the phase spectrum preserves abundant frequency components that provide extra information and complement the loss of the amplitude spectrum. To this end, we present a novel Spatial-Phase Shallow Learning (SPSL) method, which combines spatial image and phase spectrum to capture the up-sampling artifacts of face forgery to improve the transferability, for face forgery detection. And we also theoretically analyze the validity of utilizing the phase spectrum. Moreover, we notice that local texture information is more crucial than high-level semantic information for the face forgery detection task. So we reduce the receptive fields by shallowing the network to suppress high-level features and focus on the local region. Extensive experiments show that SPSL can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on cross-datasets evaluation as well as multi-class classification and obtain comparable results on single dataset evaluation.
Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an authoritative source to diagnose and counter critical cardiovascular syndromes such as arrhythmia and myocardial infarction (MI). Current machine learning techniques either depend on manually extracted features or large and complex deep learning networks which merely utilize the 1D ECG signal directly. Since intelligent multimodal fusion can perform at the stateof-the-art level with an efficient deep network, therefore, in this paper, we propose two computationally efficient multimodal fusion frameworks for ECG heart beat classification called Multimodal Image Fusion (MIF) and Multimodal Feature Fusion (MFF). At the input of these frameworks, we convert the raw ECG data into three different images using Gramian Angular Field (GAF), Recurrence Plot (RP) and Markov Transition Field (MTF). In MIF, we first perform image fusion by combining three imaging modalities to create a single image modality which serves as input to the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In MFF, we extracted features from penultimate layer of CNNs and fused them to get unique and interdependent information necessary for better performance of classifier. These informational features are finally used to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for ECG heart-beat classification. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed fusion models by performing experiments on PhysioNets MIT-BIH dataset for five distinct conditions of arrhythmias which are consistent with the AAMI EC57 protocols and on PTB diagnostics dataset for Myocardial Infarction (MI) classification. We achieved classification accuracy of 99.7% and 99.2% on arrhythmia and MI classification, respectively.
We present a novel approach for data-driven modeling of the time-domain induced polarization (IP) phenomenon using variational autoencoders (VAE). VAEs are Bayesian neural networks that aim to learn a latent statistical distribution to encode extensive data sets as lower dimension representations. We collected 1 600 319 IP decay curves in various regions of Canada, the United States and Kazakhstan, and compiled them to train a deep VAE. The proposed deep learning approach is strictly unsupervised and data-driven: it does not require manual processing or ground truth labeling of IP data. Moreover, our VAE approach avoids the pitfalls of IP parametrization with the empirical Cole-Cole and Debye decomposition models, simple power-law models, or other sophisticated mechanistic models. We demonstrate four applications of VAEs to model and process IP data: (1) representative synthetic data generation, (2) unsupervised Bayesian denoising and data uncertainty estimation, (3) quantitative evaluation of the signal-to-noise ratio, and (4) automated outlier detection. We also interpret the IP compilation's latent representation and reveal a strong correlation between its first dimension and the average chargeability of IP decays. Finally, we experiment with varying VAE latent space dimensions and demonstrate that a single real-valued scalar parameter contains sufficient information to encode our extensive IP data compilation. This new finding suggests that modeling time-domain IP data using mathematical models governed by more than one free parameter is ambiguous, whereas modeling only the average chargeability is justified. A pre-trained implementation of our model -- readily applicable to new IP data from any geolocation -- is available as open-source Python code for the applied geophysics community.