Quantum Computing for Artificial Intelligence Based Mobile Network Optimization

In this paper, we discuss how certain radio access network optimization problems can be modelled using the concept of constraint satisfaction problems in artificial intelligence, and solved at scale using a quantum computer. As a case study, we discuss root sequence index (RSI) assignment problem - an important LTE/NR physical random access channel configuration related automation use-case. We formulate RSI assignment as quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem constructed using data ingested from a commercial mobile network, and solve it using a cloud-based commercially available quantum computing platform. Results show that quantum annealing solver can successfully assign conflict-free RSIs. Comparison with well-known heuristics reveals that some classic algorithms are even more effective in terms of solution quality and computation time. The non-quantum advantage is due to the fact that current implementation is a semi-quantum proof-of-concept algorithm. Also, the results depend on the type of quantum computer used. Nevertheless, the proposed framework is highly flexible and holds tremendous potential for harnessing the power of quantum computing in mobile network automation.

MERMAID: Metaphor Generation with Symbolism and Discriminative Decoding

Generating metaphors is a challenging task as it requires a proper understanding of abstract concepts, making connections between unrelated concepts, and deviating from the literal meaning. In this paper, we aim to generate a metaphoric sentence given a literal expression by replacing relevant verbs. Based on a theoretically-grounded connection between metaphors and symbols, we propose a method to automatically construct a parallel corpus by transforming a large number of metaphorical sentences from the Gutenberg Poetry corpus (Jacobs, 2018) to their literal counterpart using recent advances in masked language modeling coupled with commonsense inference. For the generation task, we incorporate a metaphor discriminator to guide the decoding of a sequence to sequence model fine-tuned on our parallel data to generate high-quality metaphors. Human evaluation on an independent test set of literal statements shows that our best model generates metaphors better than three well-crafted baselines 66% of the time on average. A task-based evaluation shows that human-written poems enhanced with metaphors proposed by our model are preferred 68% of the time compared to poems without metaphors.

Reinforcement Learning for Industrial Control Network Cyber Security Orchestration

Defending computer networks from cyber attack requires coordinating actions across multiple nodes based on imperfect indicators of compromise while minimizing disruptions to network operations. Advanced attacks can progress with few observable signals over several months before execution. The resulting sequential decision problem has large observation and action spaces and a long time-horizon, making it difficult to solve with existing methods. In this work, we present techniques to scale deep reinforcement learning to solve the cyber security orchestration problem for large industrial control networks. We propose a novel attention-based neural architecture with size complexity that is invariant to the size of the network under protection. A pre-training curriculum is presented to overcome early exploration difficulty. Experiments show in that the proposed approaches greatly improve both the learning sample complexity and converged policy performance over baseline methods in simulation.

Hoechst Is All You Need: LymphocyteClassification with Deep Learning

Multiplex immunofluorescence and immunohistochemistry benefit patients by allowing cancer pathologists to identify several proteins expressed on the surface of cells, enabling cell classification, better understanding of the tumour micro-environment, more accurate diagnoses, prognoses, and tailored immunotherapy based on the immune status of individual patients. However, they are expensive and time consuming processes which require complex staining and imaging techniques by expert technicians. Hoechst staining is much cheaper and easier to perform, but is not typically used in this case as it binds to DNA rather than to the proteins targeted by immunofluorescent techniques, and it was not previously thought possible to differentiate cells expressing these proteins based only on DNA morphology. In this work we show otherwise, training a deep convolutional neural network to identify cells expressing three proteins (T lymphocyte markers CD3 and CD8, and the B lymphocyte marker CD20) with greater than 90% precision and recall, from Hoechst 33342 stained tissue only. Our model learns previously unknown morphological features associated with expression of these proteins which can be used to accurately differentiate lymphocyte subtypes for use in key prognostic metrics such as assessment of immune cell infiltration,and thereby predict and improve patient outcomes without the need for costly multiplex immunofluorescence.

Modeling continuous-time stochastic processes using $\mathcal{N}$-Curve mixtures

Representations of sequential data are commonly based on the assumption that observed sequences are realizations of an unknown underlying stochastic process, where the learning problem includes determination of the model parameters. In this context the model must be able to capture the multi-modal nature of the data, without blurring between modes. This property is essential for applications like trajectory prediction or human motion modeling. Towards this end, a neural network model for continuous-time stochastic processes usable for sequence prediction is proposed. The model is based on Mixture Density Networks using B\'ezier curves with Gaussian random variables as control points (abbrev.: $\mathcal{N}$-Curves). Key advantages of the model include the ability of generating smooth multi-mode predictions in a single inference step which reduces the need for Monte Carlo simulation, as required in many multi-step prediction models, based on state-of-the-art neural networks. Essential properties of the proposed approach are illustrated by several toy examples and the task of multi-step sequence prediction. Further, the model performance is evaluated on two real world use-cases, i.e. human trajectory prediction and human motion modeling, outperforming different state-of-the-art models.

Intelligent Agent for Hurricane Emergency Identification and Text Information Extraction from Streaming Social Media Big Data

This paper presents our research on leveraging social media Big Data and AI to support hurricane disaster emergency response. The current practice of hurricane emergency response for rescue highly relies on emergency call centres. The more recent Hurricane Harvey event reveals the limitations of the current systems. We use Hurricane Harvey and the associated Houston flooding as the motivating scenario to conduct research and develop a prototype as a proof-of-concept of using an intelligent agent as a complementary role to support emergency centres in hurricane emergency response. This intelligent agent is used to collect real-time streaming tweets during a natural disaster event, to identify tweets requesting rescue, to extract key information such as address and associated geocode, and to visualize the extracted information in an interactive map in decision supports. Our experiment shows promising outcomes and the potential application of the research in support of hurricane emergency response.

AutoPtosis

Blepharoptosis, or ptosis as it is more commonly referred to, is a condition of the eyelid where the upper eyelid droops. The current diagnosis for ptosis involves cumbersome manual measurements that are time-consuming and prone to human error. In this paper, we present AutoPtosis, an artificial intelligence based system with interpretable results for rapid diagnosis of ptosis. We utilize a diverse dataset collected from the Illinois Ophthalmic Database Atlas (I-ODA) to develop a robust deep learning model for prediction and also develop a clinically inspired model that calculates the marginal reflex distance and iris ratio. AutoPtosis achieved 95.5% accuracy on physician verified data that had an equal class balance. The proposed algorithm can help in the rapid and timely diagnosis of ptosis, significantly reduce the burden on the healthcare system, and save the patients and clinics valuable resources.

MIMO: Mutual Integration of Patient Journey and Medical Ontology for Healthcare Representation Learning

Healthcare representation learning on the Electronic Health Record (EHR) is seen as crucial for predictive analytics in the medical field. Many natural language processing techniques, such as word2vec, RNN and self-attention, have been adapted for use in hierarchical and time stamped EHR data, but fail when they lack either general or task-specific data. Hence, some recent works train healthcare representations by incorporating medical ontology (a.k.a. knowledge graph), by self-supervised tasks like diagnosis prediction, but (1) the small-scale, monotonous ontology is insufficient for robust learning, and (2) critical contexts or dependencies underlying patient journeys are never exploited to enhance ontology learning. To address this, we propose an end-to-end robust Transformer-based solution, Mutual Integration of patient journey and Medical Ontology (MIMO) for healthcare representation learning and predictive analytics. Specifically, it consists of task-specific representation learning and graph-embedding modules to learn both patient journey and medical ontology interactively. Consequently, this creates a mutual integration to benefit both healthcare representation learning and medical ontology embedding. Moreover, such integration is achieved by a joint training of both task-specific predictive and ontology-based disease typing tasks based on fused embeddings of the two modules. Experiments conducted on two real-world diagnosis prediction datasets show that, our healthcare representation model MIMO not only achieves better predictive results than previous state-of-the-art approaches regardless of sufficient or insufficient training data, but also derives more interpretable embeddings of diagnoses.

Exploring Transformers in Emotion Recognition: a comparison of BERT, DistillBERT, RoBERTa, XLNet and ELECTRA

This paper investigates how Natural Language Understanding (NLU) could be applied in Emotion Recognition, a specific task in affective computing. We finetuned different transformers language models (BERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, and ELECTRA) using a fine-grained emotion dataset and evaluating them in terms of performance (f1-score) and time to complete.

HASI: Hardware-Accelerated Stochastic Inference, A Defense Against Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks

DNNs are known to be vulnerable to so-called adversarial attacks, in which inputs are carefully manipulated to induce misclassification. Existing defenses are mostly software-based and come with high overheads or other limitations. This paper presents HASI, a hardware-accelerated defense that uses a process we call stochastic inference to detect adversarial inputs. HASI carefully injects noise into the model at inference time and used the model's response to differentiate adversarial inputs from benign ones. We show an adversarial detection rate of average 87% which exceeds the detection rate of the state-of-the-art approaches, with a much lower overhead. We demonstrate a software/hardware-accelerated co-design, which reduces the performance impact of stochastic inference to 1.58X-2X relative to the unprotected baseline, compared to 14X-20X overhead for a software-only GPU implementation.