Although various methods have been proposed for multi-label classification, most approaches still follow the feature learning mechanism of the single-label (multi-class) classification, namely, learning a shared image feature to classify multiple labels. However, we find this One-shared-Feature-for-Multiple-Labels (OFML) mechanism is not conducive to learning discriminative label features and makes the model non-robustness. For the first time, we mathematically prove that the inferiority of the OFML mechanism is that the optimal learned image feature cannot maintain high similarities with multiple classifiers simultaneously in the context of minimizing cross-entropy loss. To address the limitations of the OFML mechanism, we introduce the One-specific-Feature-for-One-Label (OFOL) mechanism and propose a novel disentangled label feature learning (DLFL) framework to learn a disentangled representation for each label. The specificity of the framework lies in a feature disentangle module, which contains learnable semantic queries and a Semantic Spatial Cross-Attention (SSCA) module. Specifically, learnable semantic queries maintain semantic consistency between different images of the same label. The SSCA module localizes the label-related spatial regions and aggregates located region features into the corresponding label feature to achieve feature disentanglement. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on eight datasets of three tasks, \ie, multi-label classification, pedestrian attribute recognition, and continual multi-label learning.
Locating mobile devices precisely in indoor scenarios is a challenging task because of the signal diffraction and reflection in complicated environments. One vital cause deteriorating the localization performance is the inevitable power dissipation along the propagation path of localization signals. In this paper, we propose a high-accuracy localization scheme based on the resonant beam system (RBS) and the binocular vision, i.e., binocular based resonant beam localization (BRBL). The BRBL system utilizes the energy-concentrated and self-aligned transmission of RBS to realize high-efficiency signal propagation and self-positioning for the target. The binocular method is combined with RBS to obtain the three-dimensional (3-D) coordinates of the target for the first time. To exhibit the localization mechanism, we first elaborate on the binocular localization model, including the resonant beam transmission analysis and the geometric derivation of the binocular method with RBS. Then, we establish the power model of RBS, and the signal and noise models of beam spot imaging, respectively, to analyse the performance of the BRBL system. Finally, the numerical results show an outstanding performance of centimeter level accuracy (i.e., $<5\mathrm{cm}$ in $0.4\mathrm{m}$ width and $0.4\mathrm{m}$ length effective range at $1\mathrm{m}$ vertical distance, $<13\mathrm{cm}$ in $0.6\mathrm{m}$ width and $0.6\mathrm{m}$ length effective range at $2\mathrm{m}$ vertical distance), which applies to indoor scenarios.
With the help of Deep Neural Networks, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved great success on many complex tasks during the past few years. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been used for the implementation of Deep Neural Networks with superb energy efficiency on dedicated neuromorphic hardware, and recent years have witnessed increasing attention on combining SNNs with Reinforcement Learning, whereas most approaches still work with huge energy consumption and high latency. This work proposes the Adaptive Coding Spiking Framework (ACSF) for SNN-based DRL and achieves low latency and great energy efficiency at the same time. Inspired by classical conditioning in biology, we simulate receptors, central interneurons, and effectors with spike encoders, SNNs, and spike decoders, respectively. We use our proposed ACSF to estimate the value function in reinforcement learning and conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) are dominant machine learning algorithms for modeling discrete or tabular data. Unlike neural networks with millions of trainable parameters, GBDTs optimize loss function in an additive manner and have a single trainable parameter per leaf, which makes it easy to apply high-order optimization of the loss function. In this paper, we introduce high-order optimization for GBDTs based on numerical optimization theory which allows us to construct trees based on high-order derivatives of a given loss function. In the experiments, we show that high-order optimization has faster per-iteration convergence that leads to reduced running time. Our solution can be easily parallelized and run on GPUs with little overhead on the code. Finally, we discuss future potential improvements such as automatic differentiation of arbitrary loss function and combination of GBDTs with neural networks.
Magnetic particle imaging is a relatively new tracer-based medical imaging technique exploiting the non-linear magnetization response of magnetic nanoparticles to changing magnetic fields. If the data are generated by using a field-free line, the sampling geometry resembles the one in computerized tomography. Indeed, for an ideal field-free line rotating only in between measurements it was shown that the signal equation can be written as a convolution with the Radon transform of the particle concentration. In this work, we regard a continuously rotating field-free line and extend the forward operator accordingly. We obtain a similar result for the relation to the Radon data but with two additive terms resulting from the additional time-dependencies in the forward model. We jointly reconstruct particle concentration and corresponding Radon data by means of total variation regularization yielding promising results for synthetic data.
In a connected transportation system, adaptive traffic signal controllers (ATSC) utilize real-time vehicle trajectory data received from vehicles through wireless connectivity (i.e., connected vehicles) to regulate green time. However, this wirelessly connected ATSC increases cyber-attack surfaces and increases their vulnerability to various cyber-attack modes, which can be leveraged to induce significant congestion in a roadway network. An attacker may receive financial benefits to create such a congestion for a specific roadway. One such mode is a 'sybil' attack in which an attacker creates fake vehicles in the network by generating fake Basic Safety Messages (BSMs) imitating actual connected vehicles following roadway traffic rules. The ultimate goal of an attacker will be to block a route(s) by generating fake or 'sybil' vehicles at a rate such that the signal timing and phasing changes occur without flagging any abrupt change in number of vehicles. Because of the highly non-linear and unpredictable nature of vehicle arrival rates and the ATSC algorithm, it is difficult to find an optimal rate of sybil vehicles, which will be injected from different approaches of an intersection. Thus, it is necessary to develop an intelligent cyber-attack model to prove the existence of such attacks. In this study, a reinforcement learning based cyber-attack model is developed for a waiting time-based ATSC. Specifically, an RL agent is trained to learn an optimal rate of sybil vehicle injection to create congestion for an approach(s). Our analyses revealed that the RL agent can learn an optimal policy for creating an intelligent attack.
In most medical image processing tasks, the orientation of an image would affect computing result. However, manually reorienting images wastes time and effort. In this paper, we study the problem of recognizing orientation in cardiac MRI and using deep neural network to solve this problem. For multiple sequences and modalities of MRI, we propose a transfer learning strategy, which adapts our proposed model from a single modality to multiple modalities. We also propose a prediction method that uses voting. The results shows that deep neural network is an effective way in recognition of cardiac MRI orientation and the voting prediction method could improve accuracy.
An oft-ignored challenge of real-world reinforcement learning is that the real world does not pause when agents make learning updates. As standard simulated environments do not address this real-time aspect of learning, most available implementations of RL algorithms process environment interactions and learning updates sequentially. As a consequence, when such implementations are deployed in the real world, they may make decisions based on significantly delayed observations and not act responsively. Asynchronous learning has been proposed to solve this issue, but no systematic comparison between sequential and asynchronous reinforcement learning was conducted using real-world environments. In this work, we set up two vision-based tasks with a robotic arm, implement an asynchronous learning system that extends a previous architecture, and compare sequential and asynchronous reinforcement learning across different action cycle times, sensory data dimensions, and mini-batch sizes. Our experiments show that when the time cost of learning updates increases, the action cycle time in sequential implementation could grow excessively long, while the asynchronous implementation can always maintain an appropriate action cycle time. Consequently, when learning updates are expensive, the performance of sequential learning diminishes and is outperformed by asynchronous learning by a substantial margin. Our system learns in real-time to reach and track visual targets from pixels within two hours of experience and does so directly using real robots, learning completely from scratch.
Intrinsic motivation is a promising exploration technique for solving reinforcement learning tasks with sparse or absent extrinsic rewards. There exist two technical challenges in implementing intrinsic motivation: 1) how to design a proper intrinsic objective to facilitate efficient exploration; and 2) how to combine the intrinsic objective with the extrinsic objective to help find better solutions. In the current literature, the intrinsic objectives are all designed in a task-agnostic manner and combined with the extrinsic objective via simple addition (or used by itself for reward-free pre-training). In this work, we show that these designs would fail in typical sparse-reward continuous control tasks. To address the problem, we propose Constrained Intrinsic Motivation (CIM) to leverage readily attainable task priors to construct a constrained intrinsic objective, and at the same time, exploit the Lagrangian method to adaptively balance the intrinsic and extrinsic objectives via a simultaneous-maximization framework. We empirically show, on multiple sparse-reward continuous control tasks, that our CIM approach achieves greatly improved performance and sample efficiency over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the key techniques of our CIM can also be plugged into existing methods to boost their performances.
Analyzing the behavior of complex interdependent networks requires complete information about the network topology and the interdependent links across networks. For many applications such as critical infrastructure systems, understanding network interdependencies is crucial to anticipate cascading failures and plan for disruptions. However, data on the topology of individual networks are often publicly unavailable due to privacy and security concerns. Additionally, interdependent links are often only revealed in the aftermath of a disruption as a result of cascading failures. We propose a scalable nonparametric Bayesian approach to reconstruct the topology of interdependent infrastructure networks from observations of cascading failures. Metropolis-Hastings algorithm coupled with the infrastructure-dependent proposal are employed to increase the efficiency of sampling possible graphs. Results of reconstructing a synthetic system of interdependent infrastructure networks demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and computational time. We further apply this approach to reconstruct the topology of one synthetic and two real-world systems of interdependent infrastructure networks, including gas-power-water networks in Shelby County, TN, USA, and an interdependent system of power-water networks in Italy, to demonstrate the general applicability of the approach.