Deep neural networks have revolutionized many fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. Inspired by this recent success, deep learning started to show promising results for Time Series Classification (TSC). However, neural networks are still behind the state-of-the-art TSC algorithms, that are currently composed of ensembles of 37 non deep learning based classifiers. We attribute this gap in performance due to the lack of neural network ensembles for TSC. Therefore in this paper, we show how an ensemble of 60 deep learning models can significantly improve upon the current state-of-the-art performance of neural networks for TSC, when evaluated over the UCR/UEA archive: the largest publicly available benchmark for time series analysis. Finally, we show how our proposed Neural Network Ensemble (NNE) is the first time series classifier to outperform COTE while reaching similar performance to the current state-of-the-art ensemble HIVE-COTE.

The fifth-generation cellular networks (5G) has boosted the unprecedented convergence between the information world and physical world. On the other hand, empowered with the enormous amount of data and information, artificial intelligence (AI) has been universally applied and pervasive AI is believed to be an integral part of the future cellular networks (e.g., beyond 5G, B5G). Consequently, benefiting from the advancement in communication technology and AI, we boldly argue that the conditions for collective intelligence (CI) will be mature in the B5G era and CI will emerge among the widely connected beings and things. Afterwards, we introduce a regular language (i.e., the information economy metalanguage) supporting the future communications among agents and augment human intelligence. Meanwhile, we demonstrate the achievement of agents in a simulated scenario where the agents collectively work together to form a pattern through simple indirect communications. Finally, we discuss an anytime universal intelligence test model to evaluate the intelligence level of collective agents.

The users often have many product-related questions before they make a purchase decision in E-commerce. However, it is often time-consuming to examine each user review to identify the desired information. In this paper, we propose a novel review-driven framework for answer generation for product-related questions in E-commerce, named RAGE. We develope RAGE on the basis of the multi-layer convolutional architecture to facilitate speed-up of answer generation with the parallel computation. For each question, RAGE first extracts the relevant review snippets from the reviews of the corresponding product. Then, we devise a mechanism to identify the relevant information from the noise-prone review snippets and incorporate this information to guide the answer generation. The experiments on two real-world E-Commerce datasets show that the proposed RAGE significantly outperforms the existing alternatives in producing more accurate and informative answers in natural language. Moreover, RAGE takes much less time for both model training and answer generation than the existing RNN based generation models.

In the last few years, many different methods have been focusing on using deep recurrent neural networks for natural language generation. The most widely used sequence-to-sequence neural methods are word-based: as such, they need a pre-processing step called delexicalization (conversely, relexicalization) to deal with uncommon or unknown words. These forms of processing, however, give rise to models that depend on the vocabulary used and are not completely neural. In this work, we present an end-to-end sequence-to-sequence model with attention mechanism which reads and generates at a character level, no longer requiring delexicalization, tokenization, nor even lowercasing. Moreover, since characters constitute the common "building blocks" of every text, it also allows a more general approach to text generation, enabling the possibility to exploit transfer learning for training. These skills are obtained thanks to two major features: (i) the possibility to alternate between the standard generation mechanism and a copy one, which allows to directly copy input facts to produce outputs, and (ii) the use of an original training pipeline that further improves the quality of the generated texts. We also introduce a new dataset called E2E+, designed to highlight the copying capabilities of character-based models, that is a modified version of the well-known E2E dataset used in the E2E Challenge. We tested our model according to five broadly accepted metrics (including the widely used bleu), showing that it yields competitive performance with respect to both character-based and word-based approaches.

In supervised classification, we need a vast amount of labeled training data to train our classifiers. However, it is often not easy to obtain labels due to high labeling costs [Chapelle et al., 2010], privacy concern [Warner, 1965], social bias [Nederhof, 1985], and difficulty to label data. For such reasons, there is a situation in real-world classification problems, where pairwise similarities (i.e., pairs of samples in the same class) and pairwise dissimilarities (i.e., pairs of samples in different classes) might be easier to collect than fully labeled data. For example, in the task of protein function prediction [Klein et al., 2002], the knowledge about similarities/dissimilarities can be obtained as additional supervision, which can be found by experimental means. To handle such pairwise information, similar-unlabeled (SU) classification [Bao et al., 2018] has been proposed, where the classification risk is estimated in an unbiased fashion from only similar pairs and unlabeled data. Although they assumed that only similar pairs and unlabeled data are available, we may also obtain dissimilar pairs in practice. In this case, a method which can handle all of similarities/dissimilarities and unlabeled data is desirable. Semi-supervised clustering [Wagstaff et al., 2001] is one of the methods that can handle both similar and dissimilar pairs, where must-link pairs (i.e., similar pairs) and cannot-link pairs (i.e., dissimilar pairs) are used to obtain meaningful clusters.

Distance/Similarity learning is a fundamental problem in machine learning. For example, kNN classifier or clustering methods are based on a distance/similarity measure. Metric learning algorithms enhance the efficiency of these methods by learning an optimal distance function from data. Most metric learning methods need training information in the form of pair or triplet sets. Nowadays, this training information often is obtained from the Internet via crowdsourcing methods. Therefore, this information may contain label noise or outliers leading to the poor performance of the learned metric. It is even possible that the learned metric functions perform worse than the general metrics such as Euclidean distance. To address this challenge, this paper presents a new robust metric learning method based on the Rescaled Hinge loss. This loss function is a general case of the popular Hinge loss and initially introduced in (Xu et al. 2017) to develop a new robust SVM algorithm. In this paper, we formulate the metric learning problem using the Rescaled Hinge loss function and then develop an efficient algorithm based on HQ (Half-Quadratic) to solve the problem. Experimental results on a variety of both real and synthetic datasets confirm that our new robust algorithm considerably outperforms state-of-the-art metric learning methods in the presence of label noise and outliers.

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) aims to find low dimensional vector representations of entities and relations so that their similarities can be quantized. Scoring functions (SFs), which are used to build a model to measure the similarity between entities based on a given relation, have developed as the crux of KGE. Humans have designed lots of SFs in the literature, and the evolving of SF has become the primary power source of boosting KGE's performance. However, such improvements gradually get marginal. Besides, with so many SFs, how to make a proper choice among existing SFs already becomes a non-trivial problem. Inspired by the recent success of automated machine learning (AutoML), in this paper, we propose automated KGE (AutoKGE), to design and discover distinct SFs for KGE automatically. We first identify a unified representation over popularly used SFs, which helps to set up a search space for AutoKGE. Then, we propose a greedy algorithm, which is enhanced by a predictor to estimate the final performance without model training, to search through the space. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our AutoKGE. Finally, the SFs, searched by our method, are KG dependent, new to the literature, and outperform existing state-of-the-arts SFs designed by humans.

We investigate online convex optimization in changing environments, and choose the adaptive regret as the performance measure. The goal is to achieve a small regret over every interval so that the comparator is allowed to change over time. Different from previous works that only utilize the convexity condition, this paper further exploits smoothness to improve the adaptive regret. To this end, we develop novel adaptive algorithms for convex and smooth functions, and establish problem-dependent regret bounds over any interval. Our regret bounds are comparable to existing results in the worst case, and become much tighter when the comparator has a small loss.

Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different task contexts. Contextual policy search offers data-efficient learning and generalization by explicitly conditioning the policy on a parametric context space. In this paper, we further structure the contextual policy representation. We propose to factor contexts into two components: target contexts that describe the task objectives, e.g. target position for throwing a ball; and environment contexts that characterize the environment, e.g. initial position or mass of the ball. Our key observation is that experience can be directly generalized over target contexts. We show that this can be easily exploited in contextual policy search algorithms. In particular, we apply factorization to a Bayesian optimization approach to contextual policy search both in sampling-based and active learning settings. Our simulation results show faster learning and better generalization in various robotic domains. See our supplementary video: https://youtu.be/MNTbBAOufDY.

Samuel Greengard is an author and journalist based in West Linn, OR, USA.