Africa
Studying Catastrophic Forgetting in Neural Ranking Models
Lovon-Melgarejo, Jesus, Soulier, Laure, Pinel-Sauvagnat, Karen, Tamine, Lynda
Several deep neural ranking models have been proposed in the recent IR literature. While their transferability to one target domain held by a dataset has been widely addressed using traditional domain adaptation strategies, the question of their cross-domain transferability is still under-studied. We study here in what extent neural ranking models catastrophically forget old knowledge acquired from previously observed domains after acquiring new knowledge, leading to performance decrease on those domains. Our experiments show that the effectiveness of neuralIR ranking models is achieved at the cost of catastrophic forgetting and that a lifelong learning strategy using a cross-domain regularizer success-fully mitigates the problem. Using an explanatory approach built on a regression model, we also show the effect of domain characteristics on the rise of catastrophic forgetting. We believe that the obtained results can be useful for both theoretical and practical future work in neural IR.
xERTE: Explainable Reasoning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs for Forecasting Future Links
Han, Zhen, Chen, Peng, Ma, Yunpu, Tresp, Volker
Interest has been rising lately towards modeling time-evolving knowledge graphs (KGs). Recently, graph representation learning approaches have become the dominant paradigm for link prediction on temporal KGs. However, the embeddingbased approaches largely operate in a black-box fashion, lacking the ability to judge the results' reliability. This paper provides a future link forecasting framework that reasons over query-relevant subgraphs of temporal KGs and jointly models the graph structures and the temporal context information. Especially, we propose a temporal relational attention mechanism and a novel reverse representation update scheme to guide the extraction of an enclosing subgraph around the query. The subgraph is expanded by an iterative sampling of temporal neighbors and attention propagation. As a result, our approach provides humanunderstandable arguments for the prediction. We evaluate our model on four benchmark temporal knowledge graphs for the link forecasting task. While being more explainable, our model also obtains a relative improvement of up to 17.7 % on MRR compared to the previous best KG forecasting methods. We also conduct a survey with 53 respondents, and the results show that the reasoning arguments extracted by the model for link forecasting are aligned with human understanding. Reasoning, a process of inferring new knowledge from available facts, has long been considered to be an essential subject in artificial intelligence (AI). Recently, the KGaugmented reasoning process has been studied in (Das et al., 2017; Ren et al., 2020), where knowledge graphs store factual information in form of triples (s, p, o), e.g. In particular, s (subject) and o (object) are expressed as nodes in knowledge graphs and p (predicate) as an edge type. Most knowledge graph models assume that the underlying graph is static. However, in the real world, facts and knowledge change with time, which can be treated as time-dependent multi-relational data. To accommodate time-evolving multi-relational data, temporal KGs have been introduced (Boschee et al., 2015), where temporal events are represented as a quadruple by extending the static triplet with timestamps describing when these events occurred, i.e. (Barack Obama, inaugurated, as president of the US, 2009/01/20).
Regional Attention Network (RAN) for Head Pose and Fine-grained Gesture Recognition
Behera, Ardhendu, Wharton, Zachary, Ghahremani, Morteza, Kumar, Swagat, Bessis, Nik
Affect is often expressed via non-verbal body language such as actions/gestures, which are vital indicators for human behaviors. Recent studies on recognition of fine-grained actions/gestures in monocular images have mainly focused on modeling spatial configuration of body parts representing body pose, human-objects interactions and variations in local appearance. The results show that this is a brittle approach since it relies on accurate body parts/objects detection. In this work, we argue that there exist local discriminative semantic regions, whose "informativeness" can be evaluated by the attention mechanism for inferring fine-grained gestures/actions. To this end, we propose a novel end-to-end \textbf{Regional Attention Network (RAN)}, which is a fully Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to combine multiple contextual regions through attention mechanism, focusing on parts of the images that are most relevant to a given task. Our regions consist of one or more consecutive cells and are adapted from the strategies used in computing HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradient) descriptor. The model is extensively evaluated on ten datasets belonging to 3 different scenarios: 1) head pose recognition, 2) drivers state recognition, and 3) human action and facial expression recognition. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a considerable margin in different metrics.
Inference for BART with Multinomial Outcomes
Xu, Yizhen, Hogan, Joseph W., Daniels, Michael J., Kantor, Rami, Mwangi, Ann
The multinomial probit Bayesian additive regression trees (MPBART) framework was proposed by Kindo et al. (KD), approximating the latent utilities in the multinomial probit (MNP) model with BART (Chipman et al. 2010). Compared to multinomial logistic models, MNP does not assume independent alternatives and the correlation structure among alternatives can be specified through multivariate Gaussian distributed latent utilities. We introduce two new algorithms for fitting the MPBART and show that the theoretical mixing rates of our proposals are equal or superior to the existing algorithm in KD. Through simulations, we explore the robustness of the methods to the choice of reference level, imbalance in outcome frequencies, and the specifications of prior hyperparameters for the utility error term. The work is motivated by the application of generating posterior predictive distributions for mortality and engagement in care among HIV-positive patients based on electronic health records (EHRs) from the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) in Kenya. In both the application and simulations, we observe better performance using our proposals as compared to KD in terms of MCMC convergence rate and posterior predictive accuracy.
Drew Barrymore says 'Bridgerton' inspired her to continue using dating apps
Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. Drew Barrymore is among the legion of fans who have been wrapped up in Netflix's latest hit, "Bridgerton." The "50 First Dates" and "Ever After" star invited Phoebe Dynevor and Regé-Jean Page on to her talk show to discuss the period drama. During their appearance on Friday, Barrymore revealed that the show's steamier scenes inspired the 45-year-old to try her hand once again at dating apps.
LookOut: Diverse Multi-Future Prediction and Planning for Self-Driving
Cui, Alexander, Sadat, Abbas, Casas, Sergio, Liao, Renjie, Urtasun, Raquel
Self-driving vehicles need to anticipate a diverse set of future traffic scenarios in order to safely share the road with other traffic participants that may exhibit rare but dangerous driving. In this paper, we present LookOut, an approach to jointly perceive the environment and predict a diverse set of futures from sensor data, estimate their probability, and optimize a contingency plan over these diverse future realizations. In particular, we learn a diverse joint distribution over multi-agent future trajectories in a traffic scene that allows us to cover a wide range of future modes with high sample efficiency while leveraging the expressive power of generative models. Unlike previous work in diverse motion forecasting, our diversity objective explicitly rewards sampling future scenarios that require distinct reactions from the self-driving vehicle for improved safety. Our contingency planner then finds comfortable trajectories that ensure safe reactions to a wide range of future scenarios. Through extensive evaluations, we show that our model demonstrates significantly more diverse and sample-efficient motion forecasting in a large-scale self-driving dataset as well as safer and more comfortable motion plans in long-term closed-loop simulations than current state-of-the-art models.
Artificial Intelligence for Emotion-Semantic Trending and People Emotion Detection During COVID-19 Social Isolation
Jelodar, Hamed, Orji, Rita, Matwin, Stan, Weerasinghe, Swarna, Oyebode, Oladapo, Wang, Yongli
This more than a yearlong outbreak is likely to have a significant impact on mental health of many individuals who lost loved ones, who lost personal contacts with others due to strictly enforced public health guidelines of mandatory social segregation. Complex psychological reactions to COVID-19 regulatory mechanisms of mandatory quarantine and related emotional reactions has been recognized as hard to disentangle [1] - [4]. A study conducted in Belgium found social media being positively associated with constructive coping for adolescents with anxious feelings during the quarantine period of COVID-19 [4]. Another study conducted among social media users during COVID-19 pandemic in Spain was able to capture added stress placed on people's emotional health during the pandemic period [5]. However, social media providing a platform of risk communication and exchange of feelings and emotions to curb social isolation, this text data provides a wealth of information on the natural flow of people's emotional feelings and expressions [6]. This rich source of data can be utilized to curb the data collection barriers during the pandemic. The goal of this research was to use AI to uncover the hidden, implicit signal related to emotional health of people subject to mandatory quarantine, embedded in a latent manner in their twitter messages. Within the context of this paper, an NLPbased emotion detection system aims to provide useful information by examining unstructured text data used in social media. The purpose of the NLP system used herein is to show the meaning and emotions of users' expressions related to a particular topic, which can be used to understand their psychological health and emotional wellbeing.
Recent and forthcoming machine learning and AI seminars: January 2021 edition
This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between now and the end of February 2021. We've also listed recent past seminars that are available for you to watch. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. This list includes forthcoming seminars scheduled to take place between 15 January and 28 February. Zero-shot (human-AI) coordination (in Hanabi) and ridge rider Speaker: Jakob Foerster (Facebook, University of Toronto & Vector Institute) Organised by: University College London Zoom link is here.
One, two, tree: how AI helped find millions of trees in the Sahara
When a team of international scientists set out to count every tree in a large swathe of west Africa using AI, satellite images and one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, their expectations were modest. Previously, the area had registered as having little or no tree cover. The biggest surprise, says Martin Brandt, assistant professor of geography at the University of Copenhagen, is that the part of the Sahara that the study covered, roughly 10%, "where no one would expect to find many trees", actually had "quite a few hundred million". Trees are crucial to our long-term survival, as they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global heating. But we still do not know how many there are.
TC-DTW: Accelerating Multivariate Dynamic Time Warping Through Triangle Inequality and Point Clustering
Dynamic time warping (DTW) plays an important role in analytics on time series. Despite the large body of research on speeding up univariate DTW, the method for multivariate DTW has not been improved much in the last two decades. The most popular algorithm used today is still the one developed seventeen years ago. This paper presents a solution that, as far as we know, for the first time consistently outperforms the classic multivariate DTW algorithm across dataset sizes, series lengths, data dimensions, temporal window sizes, and machines. The new solution, named TC-DTW, introduces Triangle Inequality and Point Clustering into the algorithm design on lower bound calculations for multivariate DTW. In experiments on DTW-based nearest neighbor finding, the new solution avoids as much as 98% (60% average) DTW distance calculations and yields as much as 25X (7.5X average) speedups.