MIT doctoral student Maria Bauza is exploring providing tactile feedback to robots. With the push of a button, months of hard work were about to be put to the test. Sixteen teams of engineers convened in a cavernous exhibit hall in Nagoya, Japan, for the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. The robotic systems they built were tasked with removing items from bins and placing them into boxes. For MIT graduate student Maria Bauza, who served as task-planning lead for the MIT-Princeton Team, the moment was particularly nerve-wracking.

Google may be pitching its artificial intelligence and machine learning tools for a new military project. The search giant has been winding down its involvement with the Pentagon's controversial Project Maven, but Google's Cloud team is now talking with members of the US special operations community, according to Defense One. A document distributed last month at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC) in Tampa, Florida described how Google Cloud's AI tools could be used by some special operations forces. Google has been winding down its involvement with the Pentagon's controversial Project Maven, but its Cloud team is now talking with the US special operations community The US Special Operations Forces include specialized units of the military like the Green Berets and the Navy SEALs, among others. 'As part of the Special Operations mission to turn captured enemy material into actionable intelligence, Commands are tasked with collection, exploitation, and dissemination of unclassified material to include documents, images, audio, and video,' according to the document, which was obtained by Defense One. It also notes how Google Cloud's machine learning application programming interfaces (APIs), storage resources and other technologies can help'accelerate exploitation of valuable unclassified intelligence material.'

We propose a molecular generative model based on the conditional variational autoencoder for de novo molecular design. It is specialized to control multiple molecular properties simultaneously by imposing them on a latent space. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that it can be used to generate drug-like molecules with five target properties. We were also able to adjust a single property without changing the others and to manipulate it beyond the range of the dataset.

The problem of frequent pattern mining has been studied quite extensively for various types of data, including sets, sequences, and graphs. Somewhat surprisingly, another important type of data, namely rank data, has received very little attention in data mining so far. In this paper, we therefore addresses the problem of mining rank data, that is, data in the form of rankings (total orders) of an underlying set of items. More specifically, two types of patterns are considered, namely frequent rankings and dependencies between such rankings in the form of association rules. Algorithms for mining frequent rankings and frequent closed rankings are proposed and tested experimentally, using both synthetic and real data.

How to model distribution of sequential data, including but not limited to speech and human motions, is an important ongoing research problem. It has been demonstrated that model capacity can be significantly enhanced by introducing stochastic latent variables in the hidden states of recurrent neural networks. Simultaneously, WaveNet, equipped with dilated convolutions, achieves astonishing empirical performance in natural speech generation task. In this paper, we combine the ideas from both stochastic latent variables and dilated convolutions, and propose a new architecture to model sequential data, termed as Stochastic WaveNet, where stochastic latent variables are injected into the WaveNet structure. We argue that Stochastic WaveNet enjoys powerful distribution modeling capacity and the advantage of parallel training from dilated convolutions. In order to efficiently infer the posterior distribution of the latent variables, a novel inference network structure is designed based on the characteristics of WaveNet architecture. State-of-the-art performances on benchmark datasets are obtained by Stochastic WaveNet on natural speech modeling and high quality human handwriting samples can be generated as well.

While statistics and machine learning offers numerous methods for ensuring generalization, these methods often fail in the presence of adaptivity---the common practice in which the choice of analysis depends on previous interactions with the same dataset. A recent line of work has introduced powerful, general purpose algorithms that ensure post hoc generalization (also called robust or post-selection generalization), which says that, given the output of the algorithm, it is hard to find any statistic for which the data differs significantly from the population it came from. In this work we show several limitations on the power of algorithms satisfying post hoc generalization. First, we show a tight lower bound on the error of any algorithm that satisfies post hoc generalization and answers adaptively chosen statistical queries, showing a strong barrier to progress in post selection data analysis. Second, we show that post hoc generalization is not closed under composition, despite many examples of such algorithms exhibiting strong composition properties.

Much of the literature on fair classifiers considers the case of a single classifier used once, in isolation. We initiate the study of composition of fair classifiers. In particular, we address the pitfalls of na{\i}ve composition and give general constructions for fair composition. Focusing on the individual fairness setting proposed in [Dwork, Hardt, Pitassi, Reingold, Zemel, 2011], we also extend our results to a large class of group fairness definitions popular in the recent literature. We exhibit several cases in which group fairness definitions give misleading signals under composition and conclude that additional context is needed to evaluate both group and individual fairness under composition.

An artificial agent for financial risk and returns' prediction is built with a modular cognitive system comprised of interconnected recurrent neural networks, such that the agent learns to predict the financial returns, and learns to predict the squared deviation around these predicted returns. These two expectations are used to build a volatility-sensitive interval prediction for financial returns, which is evaluated on three major financial indices and shown to be able to predict financial returns with higher than 80% success rate in interval prediction in both training and testing, raising into question the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The agent is introduced as an example of a class of artificial intelligent systems that are equipped with a Modular Networked Learning cognitive system, defined as an integrated networked system of machine learning modules, where each module constitutes a functional unit that is trained for a given specific task that solves a subproblem of a complex main problem expressed as a network of linked subproblems. In the case of neural networks, these systems function as a form of an "artificial brain", where each module is like a specialized brain region comprised of a neural network with a specific architecture.

We consider the problem of approximate $K$-means clustering with outliers and side information provided by same-cluster queries and possibly noisy answers. Our solution shows that, under some mild assumptions on the smallest cluster size, one can obtain an $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation for the optimal potential with probability at least $1-\delta$, where $\epsilon>0$ and $\delta\in(0,1)$, using an expected number of $O(\frac{K^3}{\epsilon \delta})$ noiseless same-cluster queries and comparison-based clustering of complexity $O(ndK + \frac{K^3}{\epsilon \delta})$, here, $n$ denotes the number of points and $d$ the dimension of space. Compared to a handful of other known approaches that perform importance sampling to account for small cluster sizes, the proposed query technique reduces the number of queries by a factor of roughly $O(\frac{K^6}{\epsilon^3})$, at the cost of possibly missing very small clusters. We extend this settings to the case where some queries to the oracle produce erroneous information, and where certain points, termed outliers, do not belong to any clusters. Our proof techniques differ from previous methods used for $K$-means clustering analysis, as they rely on estimating the sizes of the clusters and the number of points needed for accurate centroid estimation and subsequent nontrivial generalizations of the double Dixie cup problem. We illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm both on synthetic and real datasets, including MNIST and CIFAR $10$.

Tensor networks have found a wide use in a variety of applications in physics and computer science, recently leading to both theoretical insights as well as practical algorithms in machine learning. In this work we explore the connection between tensor networks and probabilistic graphical models, and show that it motivates the definition of generalized tensor networks where information from a tensor can be copied and reused in other parts of the network. We discuss the relationship between generalized tensor network architectures used in quantum physics, such as String-Bond States and Entangled Plaquette States, and architectures commonly used in machine learning. We provide an algorithm to train these networks in a supervised learning context and show that they overcome the limitations of regular tensor networks in higher dimensions, while keeping the computation efficient. A method to combine neural networks and tensor networks as part of a common deep learning architecture is also introduced. We benchmark our algorithm for several generalized tensor network architectures on the task of classifying images and sounds, and show that they outperform previously introduced tensor network algorithms. Some of the models we consider can be realized on a quantum computer and may guide the development of near-term quantum machine learning architectures.