Exact, Parallelizable Dynamic Time Warping Alignment with Linear Memory

Audio alignment is a fundamental preprocessing step in many MIR pipelines. For two audio clips with M and N frames, respectively, the most popular approach, dynamic time warping (DTW), has O(MN) requirements in both memory and computation, which is prohibitive for frame-level alignments at reasonable rates. To address this, a variety of memory efficient algorithms exist to approximate the optimal alignment under the DTW cost. To our knowledge, however, no exact algorithms exist that are guaranteed to break the quadratic memory barrier. In this work, we present a divide and conquer algorithm that computes the exact globally optimal DTW alignment using O(M+N) memory. Its runtime is still O(MN), trading off memory for a 2x increase in computation. However, the algorithm can be parallelized up to a factor of min(M, N) with the same memory constraints, so it can still run more efficiently than the textbook version with an adequate GPU. We use our algorithm to compute exact alignments on a collection of orchestral music, which we use as ground truth to benchmark the alignment accuracy of several popular approximate alignment schemes at scales that were not previously possible.

Interactive Segmentation via Deep Learning and B-Spline Explicit Active Surfaces

Automatic medical image segmentation via convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has shown promising results. However, they may not always be robust enough for clinical use. Sub-optimal segmentation would require clinician's to manually delineate the target object, causing frustration. To address this problem, a novel interactive CNN-based segmentation framework is proposed in this work. The aim is to represent the CNN segmentation contour as B-splines by utilising B-spline explicit active surfaces (BEAS). The interactive element of the framework allows the user to precisely edit the contour in real-time, and by utilising BEAS it ensures the final contour is smooth and anatomically plausible. This framework was applied to the task of 2D segmentation of the levator hiatus from 2D ultrasound (US) images, and compared to the current clinical tools used in pelvic floor disorder clinic (4DView, GE Healthcare; Zipf, Austria). Experimental results show that: 1) the proposed framework is more robust than current state-of-the-art CNNs; 2) the perceived workload calculated via the NASA-TLX index was reduced more than half for the proposed approach in comparison to current clinical tools; and 3) the proposed tool requires at least 13 seconds less user time than the clinical tools, which was significant (p=0.001).

On The Reliability Of Machine Learning Applications In Manufacturing Environments

The increasing deployment of advanced digital technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in industrial environments is enabling the productive use of machine learning (ML) algorithms in the manufacturing domain. As ML applications transcend from research to productive use in real-world industrial environments, the question of reliability arises. Since the majority of ML models are trained and evaluated on static datasets, continuous online monitoring of their performance is required to build reliable systems. Furthermore, concept and sensor drift can lead to degrading accuracy of the algorithm over time, thus compromising safety, acceptance and economics if undetected and not properly addressed. In this work, we exemplarily highlight the severity of the issue on a publicly available industrial dataset which was recorded over the course of 36 months and explain possible sources of drift. We assess the robustness of ML algorithms commonly used in manufacturing and show, that the accuracy strongly declines with increasing drift for all tested algorithms. We further investigate how uncertainty estimation may be leveraged for online performance estimation as well as drift detection as a first step towards continually learning applications. The results indicate, that ensemble algorithms like random forests show the least decay of confidence calibration under drift.

A TCN-based Spatial-Temporal PV Forecasting Framework with Automated Detector Network Selection

This paper proposes a two-stage PV forecasting framework for MW-level PV farms based on Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). In the day-ahead stage, inverter-level physics-based model is built to convert Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) to hourly power forecasts. TCN works as the NWP blender to merge different NWP sources to improve the forecasting accuracy. In the real-time stage, TCN can leverage the spatial-temporal correlations between the target site and its neighbors to achieve intra-hour power forecasts. A scenario-based correlation analysis method is proposed to automatically identify the most contributive neighbors. Simulation results based on 95 PV farms in North Carolina demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.

Online Estimation and Optimization of Utility-Based Shortfall Risk

Utility-Based Shortfall Risk (UBSR) is a risk metric that is increasingly popular in financial applications, owing to certain desirable properties that it enjoys. We consider the problem of estimating UBSR in a recursive setting, where samples from the underlying loss distribution are available one-at-a-time. We cast the UBSR estimation problem as a root finding problem, and propose stochastic approximation-based estimations schemes. We derive non-asymptotic bounds on the estimation error in the number of samples. We also consider the problem of UBSR optimization within a parameterized class of random variables. We propose a stochastic gradient descent based algorithm for UBSR optimization, and derive non-asymptotic bounds on its convergence.

Employing chunk size adaptation to overcome concept drift

Modern analytical systems must be ready to process streaming data and correctly respond to data distribution changes. The phenomenon of changes in data distributions is called concept drift, and it may harm the quality of the used models. Additionally, the possibility of concept drift appearance causes that the used algorithms must be ready for the continuous adaptation of the model to the changing data distributions. This work focuses on non-stationary data stream classification, where a classifier ensemble is used. To keep the ensemble model up to date, the new base classifiers are trained on the incoming data blocks and added to the ensemble while, at the same time, outdated models are removed from the ensemble. One of the problems with this type of model is the fast reaction to changes in data distributions. We propose a new Chunk Adaptive Restoration framework that can be adapted to any block-based data stream classification algorithm. The proposed algorithm adjusts the data chunk size in the case of concept drift detection to minimize the impact of the change on the predictive performance of the used model. The conducted experimental research, backed up with the statistical tests, has proven that Chunk Adaptive Restoration significantly reduces the model's restoration time.

Avoiding Catastrophe: Active Dendrites Enable Multi-Task Learning in Dynamic Environments

A key challenge for AI is to build embodied systems that operate in dynamically changing environments. Such systems must adapt to changing task contexts and learn continuously. Although standard deep learning systems achieve state of the art results on static benchmarks, they often struggle in dynamic scenarios. In these settings, error signals from multiple contexts can interfere with one another, ultimately leading to a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. In this article we investigate biologically inspired architectures as solutions to these problems. Specifically, we show that the biophysical properties of dendrites and local inhibitory systems enable networks to dynamically restrict and route information in a context-specific manner. Our key contributions are as follows. First, we propose a novel artificial neural network architecture that incorporates active dendrites and sparse representations into the standard deep learning framework. Next, we study the performance of this architecture on two separate benchmarks requiring task-based adaptation: Meta-World, a multi-task reinforcement learning environment where a robotic agent must learn to solve a variety of manipulation tasks simultaneously; and a continual learning benchmark in which the model's prediction task changes throughout training. Analysis on both benchmarks demonstrates the emergence of overlapping but distinct and sparse subnetworks, allowing the system to fluidly learn multiple tasks with minimal forgetting. Our neural implementation marks the first time a single architecture has achieved competitive results on both multi-task and continual learning settings. Our research sheds light on how biological properties of neurons can inform deep learning systems to address dynamic scenarios that are typically impossible for traditional ANNs to solve.

A Smartphone-based System for Real-time Early Childhood Caries Diagnosis

Early childhood caries (ECC) is the most common, yet preventable chronic disease in children under the age of 6. Treatments on severe ECC are extremely expensive and unaffordable for socioeconomically disadvantaged families. The identification of ECC in an early stage usually requires expertise in the field, and hence is often ignored by parents. Therefore, early prevention strategies and easy-to-adopt diagnosis techniques are desired. In this study, we propose a multistage deep learning-based system for cavity detection. We create a dataset containing RGB oral images labeled manually by dental practitioners. We then investigate the effectiveness of different deep learning models on the dataset. Furthermore, we integrate the deep learning system into an easy-to-use mobile application that can diagnose ECC from an early stage and provide real-time results to untrained users.

Learning Networked Linear Dynamical Systems under Non-white Excitation from a Single Trajectory

We consider a networked linear dynamical system with $p$ agents/nodes. We study the problem of learning the underlying graph of interactions/dependencies from observations of the nodal trajectories over a time-interval $T$. We present a regularized non-casual consistent estimator for this problem and analyze its sample complexity over two regimes: (a) where the interval $T$ consists of $n$ i.i.d. observation windows of length $T/n$ (restart and record), and (b) where $T$ is one continuous observation window (consecutive). Using the theory of $M$-estimators, we show that the estimator recovers the underlying interactions, in either regime, in a time-interval that is logarithmic in the system size $p$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to analyze the sample complexity of learning linear dynamical systems driven by unobserved not-white wide-sense stationary (WSS) inputs.

Energy-Efficient Design for a NOMA assisted STAR-RIS Network with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs) has been considered as a promising auxiliary device to enhance the performance of the wireless network, where users located at the different sides of the surfaces can be simultaneously served by the transmitting and reflecting signals. In this paper, the energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem for a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted STAR-RIS downlink network is investigated. Due to the fractional form of the EE, it is challenging to solve the EE maximization problem by the traditional convex optimization solutions. In this work, a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based algorithm is proposed to maximize the EE by jointly optimizing the transmission beamforming vectors at the base station and the coefficients matrices at the STAR-RIS. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively maximize the system EE considering the time-varying channels.