The AAAI 2017 Fall Symposium Series was held Thursday through Saturday, November 9–11, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia, adjacent to Washington, DC. The titles of the six symposia were Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction; Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications; Deep Models and Artificial Intelligence for Military Applications: Potentials, Theories, Practices, Tools and Risks; Human-Agent Groups: Studies, Algorithms and Challenges; Natural Communication for Human-Robot Collaboration; and A Standard Model of the Mind. The highlights of each symposium (except the Natural Communication for Human-Robot Collaboration symposium, whose organizers did not submit a report) are presented in this report.

Autonomous systems that understand natural language must reason about complex language and visual observations. Key to making progress towards such systems is the availability of benchmark datasets and tasks. We introduce the Cornell Natural Language Visual Reasoning (NLVR) corpus, which targets reasoning skills like counting, comparisons, and set theory. NLVR contains 92,244 examples of natural language statements paired with synthetic images and annotated with boolean values for the simple task of determining whether the sentence is true or false about the image. While it presents a simple task, NLVR has been developed to challenge systems with diverse linguistic phenomena and complex reasoning. Linguistic analysis confirms that NLVR presents diversity and complexity beyond what is provided by contemporary benchmarks. Empirical evaluation of several methods further demonstrates the open challenges NLVR presents.

The volume, veracity, variability and velocity of data produced from the ever increasing network of sensors connected to Internet pose challenges for power management, scalability and sustainability of cloud computing infrastructure. Increasing the data processing capability of edge computing devices at lower power requirements can reduce the overheads for cloud computing solutions. This paper provides the review of neuromorphic CMOS-memristive architectures that can be integrated into edge computing devices. We discuss why the neuromorphic architectures are useful for edge devices and show the advantages, drawbacks and open problems in the field of memristive circuit and architectures in terms of edge computing perspective.

User response prediction is a crucial component for personalized information retrieval and filtering scenarios, such as recommender system and web search. The data in user response prediction is mostly in a multi-field categorical format and transformed into sparse representations via one-hot encoding. Due to the sparsity problems in representation and optimization, most research focuses on feature engineering and shallow modeling. Recently, deep neural networks have attracted research attention on such a problem for their high capacity and end-to-end training scheme. In this paper, we study user response prediction in the scenario of click prediction. We first analyze a coupled gradient issue in latent vector-based models and propose kernel product to learn field-aware feature interactions. Then we discuss an insensitive gradient issue in DNN-based models and propose Product-based Neural Network (PNN) which adopts a feature extractor to explore feature interactions. Generalizing the kernel product to a net-in-net architecture, we further propose Product-network In Network (PIN) which can generalize previous models. Extensive experiments on 4 industrial datasets and 1 contest dataset demonstrate that our models consistently outperform 8 baselines on both AUC and log loss. Besides, PIN makes great CTR improvement (relatively 34.67%) in online A/B test.

When analyzing empirical data, we often find that global linear models overestimate the number of parameters required. In such cases, we may ask whether the data lies on or near a manifold or a set of manifolds (a so-called multi-manifold) of lower dimension than the ambient space. This question can be phrased as a (multi-) manifold hypothesis. The identification of such intrinsic multiscale features is a cornerstone of data analysis and representation and has given rise to a large body of work on manifold learning. In this work, we review key results on multi-scale data analysis and intrinsic dimension followed by the introduction of a heuristic, multiscale framework for testing the multi-manifold hypothesis. Our method implements a hypothesis test on a set of spline-interpolated manifolds constructed from variance-based intrinsic dimensions. The workflow is suitable for empirical data analysis as we demonstrate on two use cases.

Risk assessment is the process where we identify hazards, analyze or evaluate the risk associated with that hazard, and determine appropriate ways to eliminate or control the hazard. Risk assessment techniques have been widely applied in many area including quantitative financial engineering (Krokhmal et al. 2002), health and environment study (Zhang and Wang 2012; Van Asselt et al. 2013), transportation science (Liu et al. 2017), etc. Paltrinieri et al. (2014) point out that traditional risk assessment methods are often limited by static, onetime processes performed during the design phase of industrial processes. As such they often use older data or generic data on potential hazards and failure rates of equipment and processes and cannot be easily updated in order to take into account new information, giving a more complete view of the related risks. This failure to account for new information can lead to unrecognized hazards, or misunderstandings about the real probability of their occurrence under current management and safety precautions. With the rapid development of computational intelligence and corresponding decision support system, as well as the launch of "Big data" era, nowadays, new risk assessment technique should allow decision maker to update the assessment results by observing new information or data and realize quick response to dynamic environment. In this paper, we develop a satisficing measure based model to assess, compare and ranking random outcomes, and propose both online and offline data-driven computational frameworks.

In a large E-commerce platform, all the participants compete for impressions under the allocation mechanism of the platform. Existing methods mainly focus on the short-term return based on the current observations instead of the long-term return. In this paper, we formally establish the lifecycle model for products, by defining the introduction, growth, maturity and decline stages and their transitions throughout the whole life period. Based on such model, we further propose a reinforcement learning based mechanism design framework for impression allocation, which incorporates the first principal component based permutation and the novel experiences generation method, to maximize short-term as well as long-term return of the platform. With the power of trial-and-error, it is possible to optimize impression allocation strategies globally which is contribute to the healthy development of participants and the platform itself. We evaluate our algorithm on a simulated environment built based on one of the largest E-commerce platforms, and a significant improvement has been achieved in comparison with the baseline solutions.

Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Abstract In the modern age, rankings data is ubiquitous and it is useful for a variety of applications such as recommender systems, multi-object tracking and preference learning. However, most rankings data encountered in the real world is incomplete, which forbids the direct application of existing modelling tools for complete rankings. Our contribution is a novel way to extend kernel methods for complete rankings to partial rankings, via consistent Monte Carlo estimators of Gram matrices. These Monte Carlo kernel estimators are based on extending kernel mean embeddings to the embedding of a set of full rankings consistent with an observed partial ranking. They form a computationally tractable alternative to previous approaches for partial rankings data. We also present a novel variance reduction scheme based on an antithetic variate construction between permutations to obtain an improved estimator. An overview of the existing kernels and metrics for permutations is also provided. Keywords Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space; Partial rankings; Monte Carlo; Antithetic variates; Gram matrix 1 Motivation Permutations play a fundamental role in statistical modelling and machine learning applications involving rank-M.

Real-world data such as digital images, MRI scans and electroencephalography signals are naturally represented as matrices with structural information. Most existing classifiers aim to capture these structures by regularizing the regression matrix to be low-rank or sparse. Some other methodologies introduce factorization technique to explore nonlinear relationships of matrix data in kernel space. In this paper, we propose a multi-distance support matrix machine (MDSMM), which provides a principled way of solving matrix classification problems. The multi-distance is introduced to capture the correlation within matrix data, by means of intrinsic information in rows and columns of input data. A complex hyperplane is established upon these values to separate distinct classes. We further study the generalization bounds for i.i.d. processes and non i.i.d. process based on both SVM and SMM classifiers. For typical hypothesis classes where matrix norms are constrained, MDSMM achieves a faster learning rate than traditional classifiers. We also provide a more general approach for samples without prior knowledge. We demonstrate the merits of the proposed method by conducting exhaustive experiments on both simulation study and a number of real-word datasets.

Depth completion, the technique of estimating a dense depth image from sparse depth measurements, has a variety of applications in robotics and autonomous driving. However, depth completion faces 3 main challenges: the irregularly spaced pattern in the sparse depth input, the difficulty in handling multiple sensor modalities (when color images are available), as well as the lack of dense, pixel-level ground truth depth labels. In this work, we address all these challenges. Specifically, we develop a deep regression model to learn a direct mapping from sparse depth (and color images) to dense depth. We also propose a self-supervised training framework that requires only sequences of color and sparse depth images, without the need for dense depth labels. Our experiments demonstrate that our network, when trained with semi-dense annotations, attains state-of-the- art accuracy and is the winning approach on the KITTI depth completion benchmark at the time of submission. Furthermore, the self-supervised framework outperforms a number of existing solutions trained with semi- dense annotations.