Africa
Hausdorff Dimension, Stochastic Differential Equations, and Generalization in Neural Networks
Şimşekli, Umut, Sener, Ozan, Deligiannidis, George, Erdogdu, Murat A.
Despite its success in a wide range of applications, characterizing the generalization properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in non-convex deep learning problems is still an important challenge. While modeling the trajectories of SGD via stochastic differential equations (SDE) under heavy-tailed gradient noise has recently shed light over several peculiar characteristics of SGD, a rigorous treatment of the generalization properties of such SDEs in a learning theoretical framework is still missing. Aiming to bridge this gap, in this paper, we prove generalization bounds for SGD under the assumption that its trajectories can be well-approximated by a Feller process, which defines a rich class of Markov processes that include several recent SDE representations (both Brownian or heavy-tailed) as its special case. We show that the generalization error can be controlled by the Hausdorff dimension of the trajectories, which is intimately linked to the tail behavior of the driving process. Our results imply that heavier-tailed processes should achieve better generalization; hence, the tail-index of the process can be used as a notion of ``capacity metric''. We support our theory with experiments on deep neural networks illustrating that the proposed capacity metric accurately estimates the generalization error, and it does not necessarily grow with the number of parameters unlike the existing capacity metrics in the literature.
Unsupervised Deep Learning of Incompressible Fluid Dynamics
Wandel, Nils, Weinmann, Michael, Klein, Reinhard
Fast and stable fluid simulations are an essential prerequisite for applications ranging from computer aided aerodynamic design of automobiles or airplanes to simulations of physical effects in CGI to research in meteorology. Recent differentiable fluid simulations allow gradient based methods to optimize e.g. fluid control systems in an informed manner. Solving the partial differential equations governed by the dynamics of the underlying physical systems, however, is a challenging task and current numerical approximation schemes still come at high computational costs. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework that allows powerful deep neural networks to learn the dynamics of incompressible fluids end to end on a grid-based representation. For this purpose, we introduce a loss function that penalizes residuals of the incompressible Navier Stokes equations. After training, the framework yields models that are capable of fast and differentiable fluid simulations and can handle various fluid phenomena such as the Magnus effect and K\'arm\'an vortex streets. Besides demonstrating its real-time capability on a GPU, we exploit our approach in a control optimization scenario.
Evolution of Group-Theoretic Cryptology Attacks using Hyper-heuristics
Craven, Matthew J., Woodward, John R.
In previous work, we developed a single Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to solve random instances of the Anshel-Anshel-Goldfeld (AAG) key exchange protocol over polycyclic groups. The EA consisted of six simple heuristics which manipulated strings. The present work extends this by exploring the use of hyper-heuristics in group-theoretic cryptology for the first time. Hyper-heuristics are a way to generate new algorithms from existing algorithm components (in this case the simple heuristics), with the EAs being one example of the type of algorithm which can be generated by our hyper-heuristic framework. We take as a starting point the above EA and allow hyper-heuristics to build on it by making small tweaks to it. This adaptation is through a process of taking the EA and injecting chains of heuristics built from the simple heuristics. We demonstrate we can create novel heuristic chains, which when placed in the EA create algorithms which out-perform the existing EA. The new algorithms solve a markedly greater number of random AAG instances than the EA for harder instances. This suggests the approach could be applied to many of the same kinds of problems, providing a framework for the solution of cryptology problems over groups. The contribution of this paper is thus a framework to automatically build algorithms to attack cryptology problems.
Symbolic Logic meets Machine Learning: A Brief Survey in Infinite Domains
The tension between deduction and induction is perhaps the most fundamental issue in areas such as philosophy, cognition and artificial intelligence (AI). The deduction camp concerns itself with questions about the expressiveness of formal languages for capturing knowledge about the world, together with proof systems for reasoning from such knowledge bases. The learning camp attempts to generalize from examples about partial descriptions about the world. In AI, historically, these camps have loosely divided the development of the field, but advances in cross-over areas such as statistical relational learning, neuro-symbolic systems, and high-level control have illustrated that the dichotomy is not very constructive, and perhaps even ill-formed. In this article, we survey work that provides further evidence for the connections between logic and learning. Our narrative is structured in terms of three strands: logic versus learning, machine learning for logic, and logic for machine learning, but naturally, there is considerable overlap. We place an emphasis on the following "sore" point: there is a common misconception that logic is for discrete properties, whereas probability theory and machine learning, more generally, is for continuous properties. We report on results that challenge this view on the limitations of logic, and expose the role that logic can play for learning in infinite domains.
A systematic review and taxonomy of explanations in decision support and recommender systems
Nunes, Ingrid, Jannach, Dietmar
With the recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence, an increasing number of decision-making tasks are delegated to software systems. A key requirement for the success and adoption of such systems is that users must trust system choices or even fully automated decisions. To achieve this, explanation facilities have been widely investigated as a means of establishing trust in these systems since the early years of expert systems. With today's increasingly sophisticated machine learning algorithms, new challenges in the context of explanations, accountability, and trust towards such systems constantly arise. In this work, we systematically review the literature on explanations in advice-giving systems. This is a family of systems that includes recommender systems, which is one of the most successful classes of advice-giving software in practice. We investigate the purposes of explanations as well as how they are generated, presented to users, and evaluated. As a result, we derive a novel comprehensive taxonomy of aspects to be considered when designing explanation facilities for current and future decision support systems. The taxonomy includes a variety of different facets, such as explanation objective, responsiveness, content and presentation. Moreover, we identified several challenges that remain unaddressed so far, for example related to fine-grained issues associated with the presentation of explanations and how explanation facilities are evaluated.
Intelligent Decision Support System for Updating Control Plans
Oukhay, Fadwa, Zaraté, Pascale, Romdhane, Taieb
In the current competitive environment, it is crucial for manufacturers to make the best decisions in the shortest time, in order to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of the manufacturing systems. These decisions reach from the strategic level to tactical and operational production planning and control. In this context, elaborating intelligent decisions support systems (DSS) that are capable of integrating a wide variety of models along with data and knowledge resources has become promising. This paper proposes an intelligent DSS for quality control planning. The DSS is a recommender system (RS) that helps the decision maker to select the best control scenario using two different approaches. The first is a manual choice using a multi-criteria decision making method. The second is an automatic recommendation based on case-based reasoning (CBR) technique. Furthermore, the proposed RS makes it possible to continuously update the control plans in order to be adapted to the actual process quality situation. In so doing, CBR is used for learning the required knowledge in order to improve the decision quality. A numerical application is performed in a real case study in order to illustrate the feasibility and practicability of the proposed DSS.
Implementation of Google Assistant & Amazon Alexa on Raspberry Pi
Arya, Shailesh D., Patel, Samir
This paper investigates the implementation of voice-enabled Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa on Raspberry Pi. Virtual Assistants are being a new trend in how we interact or do computations with physical devices. A voice-enabled system essentially means a system that processes voice as an input, decodes, or understands the meaning of that input and generates an appropriate voice output. In this paper, we are developing a smart speaker prototype that has the functionalities of both in the same Raspberry Pi. Users can invoke a virtual assistant by saying the hot words and can leverage the best services of both eco-systems. This paper also explains the complex architecture of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa and the working of both assistants as well. Later, this system can be used to control the smart home IoT devices.
Uncertainty quantification for nonconvex tensor completion: Confidence intervals, heteroscedasticity and optimality
Cai, Changxiao, Poor, H. Vincent, Chen, Yuxin
We study the distribution and uncertainty of nonconvex optimization for noisy tensor completion -- the problem of estimating a low-rank tensor given incomplete and corrupted observations of its entries. Focusing on a two-stage estimation algorithm proposed by Cai et al. (2019), we characterize the distribution of this nonconvex estimator down to fine scales. This distributional theory in turn allows one to construct valid and short confidence intervals for both the unseen tensor entries and the unknown tensor factors. The proposed inferential procedure enjoys several important features: (1) it is fully adaptive to noise heteroscedasticity, and (2) it is data-driven and automatically adapts to unknown noise distributions. Furthermore, our findings unveil the statistical optimality of nonconvex tensor completion: it attains un-improvable $\ell_{2}$ accuracy -- including both the rates and the pre-constants -- when estimating both the unknown tensor and the underlying tensor factors.
A Survey of Machine Learning Methods and Challenges for Windows Malware Classification
Raff, Edward, Nicholas, Charles
Malware classification is a difficult problem, to which machine learning methods have been applied for decades. Yet progress has often been slow, in part due to a number of unique difficulties with the task that occur through all stages of the developing a machine learning system: data collection, labeling, feature creation and selection, model selection, and evaluation. In this survey we will review a number of the current methods and challenges related to malware classification, including data collection, feature extraction, and model construction, and evaluation. Our discussion will include thoughts on the constraints that must be considered for machine learning based solutions in this domain, and yet to be tackled problems for which machine learning could also provide a solution. This survey aims to be useful both to cybersecurity practitioners who wish to learn more about how machine learning can be applied to the malware problem, and to give data scientists the necessary background into the challenges in this uniquely complicated space.
On the Preservation of Spatio-temporal Information in Machine Learning Applications
In conventional machine learning applications, each data attribute is assumed to be orthogonal to others. Namely, every pair of dimension is orthogonal to each other and thus there is no distinction of in-between relations of dimensions. However, this is certainly not the case in real world signals which naturally originate from a spatio-temporal configuration. As a result, the conventional vectorization process disrupts all of the spatio-temporal information about the order/place of data whether it be $1$D, $2$D, $3$D, or $4$D. In this paper, the problem of orthogonality is first investigated through conventional $k$-means of images, where images are to be processed as vectors. As a solution, shift-invariant $k$-means is proposed in a novel framework with the help of sparse representations. A generalization of shift-invariant $k$-means, convolutional dictionary learning, is then utilized as an unsupervised feature extraction method for classification. Experiments suggest that Gabor feature extraction as a simulation of shallow convolutional neural networks provides a little better performance compared to convolutional dictionary learning. Many alternatives of convolutional-logic are also discussed for spatio-temporal information preservation, including a spatio-temporal hypercomplex encoding scheme.