A novel and efficient neural decoder algorithm is proposed. The proposed decoder is based on the neural Belief Propagation algorithm and the Automorphism Group. By combining neural belief propagation with permutations from the Automorphism Group we achieve near maximum likelihood performance for High Density Parity Check codes. Moreover, the proposed decoder significantly improves the decoding complexity, compared to our earlier work on the topic. We also investigate the training process and show how it can be accelerated. Simulations of the hessian and the condition number show why the learning process is accelerated. We demonstrate the decoding algorithm for various linear block codes of length up to 63 bits.
Boundary estimation in images and videos has been a very active topic of research, and organizing visual information into boundaries and segments is believed to be a corner stone of visual perception. While prior work has focused on estimating boundaries for observed frames, our work aims at predicting boundaries of future unobserved frames. This requires our model to learn about the fate of boundaries and corresponding motion patterns -- including a notion of "intuitive physics". We experiment on natural video sequences along with synthetic sequences with deterministic physics-based and agent-based motions. While not being our primary goal, we also show that fusion of RGB and boundary prediction leads to improved RGB predictions.
We investigate the pertinence of methods from algebraic topology for text data analysis. These methods enable the development of mathematically-principled isometric-invariant mappings from a set of vectors to a document embedding, which is stable with respect to the geometry of the document in the selected metric space. In this work, we evaluate the utility of these topology-based document representations in traditional NLP tasks, specifically document clustering and sentiment classification. We find that the embeddings do not benefit text analysis. In fact, performance is worse than simple techniques like $\textit{tf-idf}$, indicating that the geometry of the document does not provide enough variability for classification on the basis of topic or sentiment in the chosen datasets.
In machine learning, the use of an artificial neural network is the mainstream approach. Such a network consists of layers of neurons. These neurons are of the same type characterized by the two features: (1) an inner product of an input vector and a matching weighting vector of trainable parameters and (2) a nonlinear excitation function. Here we investigate the possibility of replacing the inner product with a quadratic function of the input vector, thereby upgrading the 1st order neuron to the 2nd order neuron, empowering individual neurons, and facilitating the optimization of neural networks. Also, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the feasibility and merits of the 2nd order neurons. Finally, further topics are discussed.
In this paper we describe a method to detect event descrip- tions in different news articles and to model the semantics of events and their components using RDF representations. We compare these descriptions to solve a cross-document event coreference task. Our com- ponent approach to event semantics defines identity and granularity of events at different levels. It performs close to state-of-the-art approaches on the cross-document event coreference task, while outperforming other works when assuming similar quality of event detection. We demonstrate how granularity and identity are interconnected and we discuss how se- mantic anomaly could be used to define differences between coreference, subevent and topical relations.
This paper is a tutorial on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and its applications. FCA is an applied branch of Lattice Theory, a mathematical discipline which enables formalisation of concepts as basic units of human thinking and analysing data in the object-attribute form. Originated in early 80s, during the last three decades, it became a popular human-centred tool for knowledge representation and data analysis with numerous applications. Since the tutorial was specially prepared for RuSSIR 2014, the covered FCA topics include Information Retrieval with a focus on visualisation aspects, Machine Learning, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Text Mining and several others.
In typical applications of Bayesian optimization, minimal assumptions are made about the objective function being optimized. This is true even when researchers have prior information about the shape of the function with respect to one or more argument. We make the case that shape constraints are often appropriate in at least two important application areas of Bayesian optimization: (1) hyperparameter tuning of machine learning algorithms and (2) decision analysis with utility functions. We describe a methodology for incorporating a variety of shape constraints within the usual Bayesian optimization framework and present positive results from simple applications which suggest that Bayesian optimization with shape constraints is a promising topic for further research.
Autonomous driving is one of the most recent topics of interest which is aimed at replicating human driving behavior keeping in mind the safety issues. We approach the problem of learning synthetic driving using generative neural networks. The main idea is to make a controller trainer network using images plus key press data to mimic human learning. We used the architecture of a stable GAN to make predictions between driving scenes using key presses. We train our model on one video game (Road Rash) and tested the accuracy and compared it by running the model on other maps in Road Rash to determine the extent of learning.
The need for new methods to deal with big data is a common theme in most scientific fields, although its definition tends to vary with the context. Statistical ideas are an essential part of this, and as a partial response, a thematic program on statistical inference, learning, and models in big data was held in 2015 in Canada, under the general direction of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute, with major funding from, and most activities located at, the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. This paper gives an overview of the topics covered, describing challenges and strategies that seem common to many different areas of application, and including some examples of applications to make these challenges and strategies more concrete.
While it has long been believed in psychology that weather somehow influences human's mood, the debates have been going on for decades about how they are correlated. In this paper, we try to study this long-lasting topic by harnessing a new source of data compared from traditional psychological researches: Twitter. We analyze 2 years' twitter data collected by twitter API which amounts to $10\%$ of all postings and try to reveal the correlations between multiple dimensional structure of human mood with meteorological effects. Some of our findings confirm existing hypotheses, while others contradict them. We are hopeful that our approach, along with the new data source, can shed on the long-going debates on weather-mood correlation.