Africa
Dictionary-based Low-Rank Approximations and the Mixed Sparse Coding problem
Constrained tensor and matrix factorization models allow to extract interpretable patterns from multiway data. Therefore identifiability properties and efficient algorithms for constrained low-rank approximations are nowadays important research topics. This work deals with columns of factor matrices of a low-rank approximation being sparse in a known and possibly overcomplete basis, a model coined as Dictionary-based Low-Rank Approximation (DLRA). While earlier contributions focused on finding factor columns inside a dictionary of candidate columns, i.e. one-sparse approximations, this work is the first to tackle DLRA with sparsity larger than one. I propose to focus on the sparse-coding subproblem coined Mixed Sparse-Coding (MSC) that emerges when solving DLRA with an alternating optimization strategy. Several algorithms based on sparse-coding heuristics (greedy methods, convex relaxations) are provided to solve MSC. The performance of these heuristics is evaluated on simulated data. Then, I show how to adapt an efficient MSC solver based on the LASSO to compute Dictionary-based Matrix Factorization and Canonical Polyadic Decomposition in the context of hyperspectral image processing and chemometrics. These experiments suggest that DLRA extends the modeling capabilities of low-rank approximations, helps reducing estimation variance and enhances the identifiability and interpretability of estimated factors.
Knowledge Enhanced Sports Game Summarization
Wang, Jiaan, Li, Zhixu, Zhang, Tingyi, Zheng, Duo, Qu, Jianfeng, Liu, An, Zhao, Lei, Chen, Zhigang
Sports game summarization aims at generating sports news from live commentaries. However, existing datasets are all constructed through automated collection and cleaning processes, resulting in a lot of noise. Besides, current works neglect the knowledge gap between live commentaries and sports news, which limits the performance of sports game summarization. In this paper, we introduce K-SportsSum, a new dataset with two characteristics: (1) K-SportsSum collects a large amount of data from massive games. It has 7,854 commentary-news pairs. To improve the quality, K-SportsSum employs a manual cleaning process; (2) Different from existing datasets, to narrow the knowledge gap, K-SportsSum further provides a large-scale knowledge corpus that contains the information of 523 sports teams and 14,724 sports players. Additionally, we also introduce a knowledge-enhanced summarizer that utilizes both live commentaries and the knowledge to generate sports news. Extensive experiments on K-SportsSum and SportsSum datasets show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art performances. Qualitative analysis and human study further verify that our model generates more informative sports news.
Cerebras Systems, G42 to Bring AI Compute Capabilities to the Region
Artificial intelligence (AI) compute solutions provider Cerebras Systems and G42, the UAE-based AI and cloud computing company, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) at GMIS, under which they will bring high performance AI capabilities to the Middle East. G42, who manages the region's largest cloud computing infrastructure, will upgrade its technology stack with Cerebras' CS-2 systems to deliver AI compute capabilities to its partners and the broader ecosystem. "Cerebras, in partnership with our extraordinary customers, has achieved incredible breakthroughs that are transforming AI," said Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-Founder of Cerebras Systems. "We are privileged to be working with G42, the Middle East's leader in AI innovation. Together we will transform our industry, making the impossible commonplace."
Post-discovery Analysis of Anomalous Subsets
Mulang', Isaiah Onando, Ogallo, William, Tadesse, Girmaw Abebe, Walcott-Bryant, Aisha
Analyzing the behaviour of a population in response to disease and interventions is critical to unearth variability in healthcare as well as understand sub-populations that require specialized attention, but also to assist in designing future interventions. Two aspects become very essential in such analysis namely: i) Discovery of differentiating patterns exhibited by sub-populations, and ii) Characterization of the identified subpopulations. For the discovery phase, an array of approaches in the anomalous pattern detection literature have been employed to reveal differentiating patterns, especially to identify anomalous subgroups. However, these techniques are limited to describing the anomalous subgroups and offer little in form of insightful characterization, thereby limiting interpretability and understanding of these data-driven techniques in clinical practices. In this work, we propose an analysis of differentiated output (rather than discovery) and quantify anomalousness similarly to the counter-factual setting. To this end we design an approach to perform post-discovery analysis of anomalous subsets, in which we initially identify the most important features on the anomalousness of the subsets, then by perturbation, the approach seeks to identify the least number of changes necessary to lose anomalousness. Our approach is presented and the evaluation results on the 2019 MarketScan Commercial Claims and Medicare data, show that extra insights can be obtained by extrapolated examination of the identified subgroups.
Semantic-Aware Collaborative Deep Reinforcement Learning Over Wireless Cellular Networks
Lotfi, Fatemeh, Semiari, Omid, Saad, Walid
Collaborative deep reinforcement learning (CDRL) algorithms in which multiple agents can coordinate over a wireless network is a promising approach to enable future intelligent and autonomous systems that rely on real-time decision-making in complex dynamic environments. Nonetheless, in practical scenarios, CDRL faces many challenges due to the heterogeneity of agents and their learning tasks, different environments, time constraints of the learning, and resource limitations of wireless networks. To address these challenges, in this paper, a novel semantic-aware CDRL method is proposed to enable a group of heterogeneous untrained agents with semantically-linked DRL tasks to collaborate efficiently across a resource-constrained wireless cellular network. To this end, a new heterogeneous federated DRL (HFDRL) algorithm is proposed to select the best subset of semantically relevant DRL agents for collaboration. The proposed approach then jointly optimizes the training loss and wireless bandwidth allocation for the cooperating selected agents in order to train each agent within the time limit of its real-time task. Simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Graph Neural Networks with Parallel Neighborhood Aggregations for Graph Classification
Doshi, Siddhant, Chepuri, Sundeep Prabhakar
We focus on graph classification using a graph neural network (GNN) model that precomputes the node features using a bank of neighborhood aggregation graph operators arranged in parallel. These GNN models have a natural advantage of reduced training and inference time due to the precomputations but are also fundamentally different from popular GNN variants that update node features through a sequential neighborhood aggregation procedure during training. We provide theoretical conditions under which a generic GNN model with parallel neighborhood aggregations (PA-GNNs, in short) are provably as powerful as the well-known Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) graph isomorphism test in discriminating non-isomorphic graphs. Although PA-GNN models do not have an apparent relationship with the WL test, we show that the graph embeddings obtained from these two methods are injectively related. We then propose a specialized PA-GNN model, called SPIN, which obeys the developed conditions. We demonstrate via numerical experiments that the developed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on many diverse real-world datasets while maintaining the discriminative power of the WL test and the computational advantage of preprocessing graphs before the training process.
Towards Improving Embedding Based Models of Social Network Alignment via Pseudo Anchors
Yan, Zihan, Liu, Li, Li, Xin, Cheung, William K., Zhang, Youmin, Liu, Qun, Wang, Guoyin
Social network alignment aims at aligning person identities across social networks. Embedding based models have been shown effective for the alignment where the structural proximity preserving objective is typically adopted for the model training. With the observation that ``overly-close'' user embeddings are unavoidable for such models causing alignment inaccuracy, we propose a novel learning framework which tries to enforce the resulting embeddings to be more widely apart among the users via the introduction of carefully implanted pseudo anchors. We further proposed a meta-learning algorithm to guide the updating of the pseudo anchor embeddings during the learning process. The proposed intervention via the use of pseudo anchors and meta-learning allows the learning framework to be applicable to a wide spectrum of network alignment methods. We have incorporated the proposed learning framework into several state-of-the-art models. Our experimental results demonstrate its efficacy where the methods with the pseudo anchors implanted can outperform their counterparts without pseudo anchors by a fairly large margin, especially when there only exist very few labeled anchors.
General Board Geometry
Browne, Cameron, Piette, Éric, Stephenson, Matthew, Soemers, Dennis J. N. J.
Game boards are described in the Ludii general game system by their underlying graphs, based on tiling, shape and graph operators, with the automatic detection of important properties such as topological relationships between graph elements, directions and radial step sequences. This approach allows most conceivable game boards to be described simply and succinctly.
Off-Policy Correction For Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Zawalski, Michał, Osiński, Błażej, Michalewski, Henryk, Miłoś, Piotr
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) provides a framework for problems involving multiple interacting agents. Despite apparent similarity to the single-agent case, multi-agent problems are often harder to train and analyze theoretically. In this work, we propose MA-Trace, a new on-policy actor-critic algorithm, which extends V-Trace to the MARL setting. The key advantage of our algorithm is its high scalability in a multi-worker setting. To this end, MA-Trace utilizes importance sampling as an off-policy correction method, which allows distributing the computations with no impact on the quality of training. Furthermore, our algorithm is theoretically grounded - we prove a fixed-point theorem that guarantees convergence. We evaluate the algorithm extensively on the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge, a standard benchmark for multi-agent algorithms. MA-Trace achieves high performance on all its tasks and exceeds state-of-the-art results on some of them.
Neural Program Generation Modulo Static Analysis
Mukherjee, Rohan, Wen, Yeming, Chaudhari, Dipak, Reps, Thomas W., Chaudhuri, Swarat, Jermaine, Chris
State-of-the-art neural models of source code tend to be evaluated on the generation of individual expressions and lines of code, and commonly fail on long-horizon tasks such as the generation of entire method bodies. We propose to address this deficiency using weak supervision from a static program analyzer. Our neurosymbolic method allows a deep generative model to symbolically compute, using calls to a static-analysis tool, long-distance semantic relationships in the code that it has already generated. During training, the model observes these relationships and learns to generate programs conditioned on them. We apply our approach to the problem of generating entire Java methods given the remainder of the class that contains the method. Our experiments show that the approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art transformers and a model that explicitly tries to learn program semantics on this task, both in terms of producing programs free of basic semantic errors and in terms of syntactically matching the ground truth.