Iași
The Climate Crisis Threatens Supply Chains. Manufacturers Hope AI Can Help
When clothing designers place an order at Katty Fashion's factory in Iași, Romania, they expect a bespoke service. If necessary, the factory will even rejig its production lines to make whichever garment a designer commissions. "From order to order, we may have to adapt," says Eduard Modreanu, the company's technical lead. "We cannot create one production line or shop floor that fits everyone." This adaptability is useful given the many diverse clients and orders Katty Fashion juggles, but it could also help future-proof the company against climate shocks.
An analysis of higher-order kinematics formalisms for an innovative surgical parallel robot
Vaida, Calin, Birlescu, Iosif, Gherman, Bogdan, Condurache, Daniel, Chablat, Damien, Pisla, Doina
The paper presents a novel modular hybrid parallel robot for pancreatic surgery and its higher-order kinematics derived based on various formalisms. The classical vector, homogeneous transformation matrices and dual quaternion approaches are studied for the kinematic functions using both classical differentiation and multidual algebra. The algorithms for inverse kinematics for all three studied formalisms are presented for both differentiation and multidual algebra approaches. Furthermore, these algorithms are compared based on numerical stability, execution times and number and type of mathematical functions and operators contained in each algorithm. A statistical analysis shows that there is significant improvement in execution time for the algorithms implemented using multidual algebra, while the numerical stability is appropriate for all algorithms derived based on differentiation and multidual algebra. While the implementation of the kinematic algorithms using multidual algebra shows positive results when benchmarked on a standard PC, further work is required to evaluate the multidual algorithms on hardware/software used for the modular parallel robot command and control.
Incremental Online Learning of Randomized Neural Network with Forward Regularization
Wang, Junda, Hu, Minghui, Li, Ning, Al-Ali, Abdulaziz, Suganthan, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam
Online learning of deep neural networks suffers from challenges such as hysteretic non-incremental updating, increasing memory usage, past retrospective retraining, and catastrophic forgetting. To alleviate these drawbacks and achieve progressive immediate decision-making, we propose a novel Incremental Online Learning (IOL) process of Randomized Neural Networks (Randomized NN), a framework facilitating continuous improvements to Randomized NN performance in restrictive online scenarios. Within the framework, we further introduce IOL with ridge regularization (-R) and IOL with forward regularization (-F). -R generates stepwise incremental updates without retrospective retraining and avoids catastrophic forgetting. Moreover, we substituted -R with -F as it enhanced precognition learning ability using semi-supervision and realized better online regrets to offline global experts compared to -R during IOL. The algorithms of IOL for Randomized NN with -R/-F on non-stationary batch stream were derived respectively, featuring recursive weight updates and variable learning rates. Additionally, we conducted a detailed analysis and theoretically derived relative cumulative regret bounds of the Randomized NN learners with -R/-F in IOL under adversarial assumptions using a novel methodology and presented several corollaries, from which we observed the superiority on online learning acceleration and regret bounds of employing -F in IOL. Finally, our proposed methods were rigorously examined across regression and classification tasks on diverse datasets, which distinctly validated the efficacy of IOL frameworks of Randomized NN and the advantages of forward regularization.
VEL: A Formally Verified Reasoner for OWL2 EL Profile
Ileri, Atalay Mert, Rangarajan, Nalen, Cannell, Jack, McGinty, Hande
Over the past two decades, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) has been instrumental in advancing the development of ontologies and knowledge graphs, providing a structured framework that enhances the semantic integration of data. However, the reliability of deductive reasoning within these systems remains challenging, as evidenced by inconsistencies among popular reasoners in recent competitions. This evidence underscores the limitations of current testing-based methodologies, particularly in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. To mitigate these issues, in this paper, we have developed VEL, a formally verified EL++ reasoner equipped with machine-checkable correctness proofs that ensure the validity of outputs across all possible inputs. This formalization, based on the algorithm of Baader et al., has been transformed into executable OCaml code using the Coq proof assistant's extraction capabilities. Our formalization revealed several errors in the original completeness proofs, which led to changes to the algorithm to ensure its completeness. Our work demonstrates the necessity of mechanization of reasoning algorithms to ensure their correctness at theoretical and implementation levels.
A Comparative Study of Sampling Methods with Cross-Validation in the FedHome Framework
Ahmadi, Arash, Sharif, Sarah S., Banad, Yaser M.
This paper presents a comparative study of sampling methods within the FedHome framework, designed for personalized in-home health monitoring. FedHome leverages federated learning (FL) and generative convolutional autoencoders (GCAE) to train models on decentralized edge devices while prioritizing data privacy. A notable challenge in this domain is the class imbalance in health data, where critical events such as falls are underrepresented, adversely affecting model performance. To address this, the research evaluates six oversampling techniques using Stratified K-fold cross-validation: SMOTE, Borderline-SMOTE, Random OverSampler, SMOTE-Tomek, SVM-SMOTE, and SMOTE-ENN. These methods are tested on FedHome's public implementation over 200 training rounds with and without stratified K-fold cross-validation. The findings indicate that SMOTE-ENN achieves the most consistent test accuracy, with a standard deviation range of 0.0167-0.0176, demonstrating stable performance compared to other samplers. In contrast, SMOTE and SVM-SMOTE exhibit higher variability in performance, as reflected by their wider standard deviation ranges of 0.0157-0.0180 and 0.0155-0.0180, respectively. Similarly, the Random OverSampler method shows a significant deviation range of 0.0155-0.0176. SMOTE-Tomek, with a deviation range of 0.0160-0.0175, also shows greater stability but not as much as SMOTE-ENN. This finding highlights the potential of SMOTE-ENN to enhance the reliability and accuracy of personalized health monitoring systems within the FedHome framework.
FFF: Fixing Flawed Foundations in contrastive pre-training results in very strong Vision-Language models
Bulat, Adrian, Ouali, Yassine, Tzimiropoulos, Georgios
Despite noise and caption quality having been acknowledged as important factors impacting vision-language contrastive pre-training, in this paper, we show that the full potential of improving the training process by addressing such issues is yet to be realized. Specifically, we firstly study and analyze two issues affecting training: incorrect assignment of negative pairs, and low caption quality and diversity. Then, we devise effective solutions for addressing both problems, which essentially require training with multiple true positive pairs. Finally, we propose training with sigmoid loss to address such a requirement. We show very large gains over the current state-of-the-art for both image recognition ($\sim +6\%$ on average over 11 datasets) and image retrieval ($\sim +19\%$ on Flickr30k and $\sim +15\%$ on MSCOCO).
Fusing Dictionary Learning and Support Vector Machines for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
Irofti, Paul, Hîji, Iulian-Andrei, Pătraşcu, Andrei, Cleju, Nicolae
We study in this paper the improvement of one-class support vector machines (OC-SVM) through sparse representation techniques for unsupervised anomaly detection. As Dictionary Learning (DL) became recently a common analysis technique that reveals hidden sparse patterns of data, our approach uses this insight to endow unsupervised detection with more control on pattern finding and dimensions. We introduce a new anomaly detection model that unifies the OC-SVM and DL residual functions into a single composite objective, subsequently solved through K-SVD-type iterative algorithms. A closed-form of the alternating K-SVD iteration is explicitly derived for the new composite model and practical implementable schemes are discussed. The standard DL model is adapted for the Dictionary Pair Learning (DPL) context, where the usual sparsity constraints are naturally eliminated. Finally, we extend both objectives to the more general setting that allows the use of kernel functions. The empirical convergence properties of the resulting algorithms are provided and an in-depth analysis of their parametrization is performed while also demonstrating their numerical performance in comparison with existing methods.
Neural Information Organizing and Processing -- Neural Machines
In nature, neural information processing emerged with the necessity of complex beings such as animals to manage information in a more dynamic manner to ensure their interaction with an unpredictable environment, and implicitly their survival, by specialize certain cells for information management purpose through the nervous system as an integrative component of sensing and actuating (afferent and efferent) external and internal information by developing functions aimed to ensuring the adaptive and resilient characteristics. Through computing systems, the neural type of information processing began to be investigated for its perspective of use within artificial computing systems for understanding and validating natural neural processes through simulations as well for constructing devices with neural specific functions, consequently, various neural information aspects being highlighted over the time [1-17]. The neural information processing methods, although they have a tortuous history and do not have yet a coherent model not even at a fundamental level, are beginning to prove convincing in areas where specifically neural processes are more relevant than purely digital ones, such as: natural languages processing (text transformations, speech recognition and synthesis, etc.), patterns recognition, creative processing (multimedia), data analysis (healthcare, finance), control and coordination (robotics), etc. [7 - 17]. Since in essence the neural processes realize functional transformations of some contextual information, they are find usefulness in related fields such as formal systems, computing tools (compilers, libraries), etc. [18, 19].
Hierarchical Classification of Transversal Skills in Job Ads Based on Sentence Embeddings
Leon, Florin, Gavrilescu, Marius, Floria, Sabina-Adriana, Minea, Alina-Adriana
The field of text classification, a fundamental subdomain within the natural language processing (NLP) field of machine learning (ML), has witnessed a remarkable evolution in recent years. With the exponential increase in textual data generated across various domains, the need for effective text classification methods has become increasingly pressing. Text classification is the task of assigning predefined labels or categories to textual documents based on their content. This task holds immense importance across various industries and applications, including but not limited to sentiment analysis, spam detection, content recommendation, and news classification. The ability to automatically organize and categorize large volumes of text can streamline information retrieval, enhance decision-making processes, and enable efficient data management. Traditional text classification methods rely on well-established techniques such as term frequency - inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) representations and traditional ML algorithms. TF-IDF measures the importance of each term within a document relative to a corpus of documents, providing a numerical representation of textual data.
A Review of Findings from Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology as Possible Inspiration for the Path to Artificial General Intelligence
This review aims to contribute to the quest for artificial general intelligence by examining neuroscience and cognitive psychology methods for potential inspiration. Despite the impressive advancements achieved by deep learning models in various domains, they still have shortcomings in abstract reasoning and causal understanding. Such capabilities should be ultimately integrated into artificial intelligence systems in order to surpass data-driven limitations and support decision making in a way more similar to human intelligence. This work is a vertical review that attempts a wide-ranging exploration of brain function, spanning from lower-level biological neurons, spiking neural networks, and neuronal ensembles to higher-level concepts such as brain anatomy, vector symbolic architectures, cognitive and categorization models, and cognitive architectures. The hope is that these concepts may offer insights for solutions in artificial general intelligence.