Deep neural networks have established as a powerful tool for large scale supervised classification tasks. The state-of-the-art performances of deep neural networks are conditioned to the availability of large number of accurately labeled samples. In practice, collecting large scale accurately labeled datasets is a challenging and tedious task in most scenarios of remote sensing image analysis, thus cheap surrogate procedures are employed to label the dataset. Training deep neural networks on such datasets with inaccurate labels easily overfits to the noisy training labels and degrades the performance of the classification tasks drastically. To mitigate this effect, we propose an original solution with entropic optimal transportation. It allows to learn in an end-to-end fashion deep neural networks that are, to some extent, robust to inaccurately labeled samples. We empirically demonstrate on several remote sensing datasets, where both scene and pixel-based hyperspectral images are considered for classification. Our method proves to be highly tolerant to significant amounts of label noise and achieves favorable results against state-of-the-art methods.

Humans learn complex latent structures from their environments (e.g., natural language, mathematics, music, social hierarchies). In cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, models that infer higher-order structures from sensory or first-order representations have been proposed to account for the complexity and flexibility of human behavior. But how do the structures that these models invoke arise in neural systems in the first place? To answer this question, we explain how a system can learn latent representational structures (i.e., predicates) from experience with wholly unstructured data. During the process of predicate learning, an artificial neural network exploits the naturally occurring dynamic properties of distributed computing across neuronal assemblies in order to learn predicates, but also to combine them compositionally, two computational aspects which appear to be necessary for human behavior as per formal theories in multiple domains. We describe how predicates can be combined generatively using neural oscillations to achieve human-like extrapolation and compositionality in an artificial neural network. The ability to learn predicates from experience, to represent structures compositionally, and to extrapolate to unseen data offers an inroads to understanding and modeling the most complex human behaviors.

This informal technical report details the geometric illustration of decision boundaries for ReLU units in a three layer fully connected neural network. The network is designed and trained to predict pixel intensity from an (x, y) input location. The Geometric Illustration of Neural Networks (GINN) tool was built to visualise and track the points at which ReLU units switch from being active to off (or vice versa) as the network undergoes training. Several phenomenon were observed and are discussed herein. This technical report is a supporting document to the blog post with online demos and is available at http://www.bayeswatch.com/2018/09/17/GINN/.

This work explores the idea of a causal contextual multi-armed bandit approach to automated marketing, where we estimate and optimize the causal (incremental) effects. Focusing on causal effect leads to better return on investment (ROI) by targeting only the persuadable customers who wouldn't have taken the action organically. Our approach draws on strengths of causal inference, uplift modeling, and multi-armed bandits. It optimizes on causal treatment effects rather than pure outcome, and incorporates counterfactual generation within data collection. Following uplift modeling results, we optimize over the incremental business metric. Multi-armed bandit methods allow us to scale to multiple treatments and to perform off-policy policy evaluation on logged data. The Thompson sampling strategy in particular enables exploration of treatments on similar customer contexts and materialization of counterfactual outcomes. Preliminary offline experiments on a retail Fashion marketing dataset show merits of our proposal.

Estimating fundamental matrices is a classic problem in computer vision. Traditional methods rely heavily on the correctness of estimated key-point correspondences, which can be noisy and unreliable. As a result, it is difficult for these methods to handle image pairs with large occlusion or significantly different camera poses. In this paper, we propose novel neural network architectures to estimate fundamental matrices in an end-to-end manner without relying on point correspondences. New modules and layers are introduced in order to preserve mathematical properties of the fundamental matrix as a homogeneous rank-2 matrix with seven degrees of freedom. We analyze performance of the proposed models using various metrics on the KITTI dataset, and show that they achieve competitive performance with traditional methods without the need for extracting correspondences.

This work offers a broad perspective on probabilistic modeling and inference in light of recent advances in probabilistic programming, in which models are formally expressed in Turing-complete programming languages. We consider a typical workflow and how probabilistic programming languages can help to automate this workflow, especially in the matching of models with inference methods. We focus on two properties of a model that are critical in this matching: its structure---the conditional dependencies between random variables---and its form---the precise mathematical definition of those dependencies. While the structure and form of a probabilistic model are often fixed a priori, it is a curiosity of probabilistic programming that they need not be, and may instead vary according to random choices made during program execution. We introduce a formal description of models expressed as programs, and discuss some of the ways in which probabilistic programming languages can reveal the structure and form of these, in order to tailor inference methods. We demonstrate the ideas with a new probabilistic programming language called Birch, with a multiple object tracking example.

Computational identification of promoters is notoriously difficult as human genes often have unique promoter sequences that provide regulation of transcription and interaction with transcription initiation complex. While there are many attempts to develop computational promoter identification methods, we have no reliable tool to analyze long genomic sequences. In this work we further develop our deep learning approach that was relatively successful to discriminate short promoter and non-promoter sequences. Instead of focusing on the classification accuracy, in this work we predict the exact positions of the TSS inside the genomic sequences testing every possible location. We studied human promoters to find effective regions for discrimination and built corresponding deep learning models. These models use adaptively constructed negative set which iteratively improves the models discriminative ability. The developed promoter identification models significantly outperform the previously developed promoter prediction programs by considerably reducing the number of false positive predictions. The best model we have built has recall 0.76, precision 0.77 and MCC 0.76, while the next best tool FPROM achieved precision 0.48 and MCC 0.60 for the recall of 0.75. Our method is available at http://www.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/PromID/.

Despite its omnipresence in robotics application, the nature of spatial knowledge and the mechanisms that underlie its emergence in autonomous agents are still poorly understood. Recent theoretical work suggests that the concept of space can be grounded by capturing invariants that space's structure induces in an agent's raw sensorimotor experience. Moreover, it is hypothesized that capturing these invariants is beneficial for a naive agent trying to predict its sensorimotor experience. Under certain exploratory conditions, spatial representations should thus emerge as a byproduct of learning to predict. We propose a simple sensorimotor predictive scheme, apply it to different agents and types of exploration, and evaluate the pertinence of this hypothesis. We show that a naive agent can capture the topology and metric regularity of its spatial configuration without any a priori knowledge, nor extraneous supervision. Space appears to be a pervasive concept in our perception of the world, and as such plays a central role in most artificial perception systems, in particular in computer vision and robotics applications. Yet its fundamental nature and the mechanisms that could lead to its emergence in an artificial system still remain poorly understood (Kant, 1998; Poincaré, 1895; Nicod, 1924). In most cases, the problem is circumvented by implementing prior knowledge in the system regarding the structure of space, and how motor and sensory information convey spatial properties (for instance through a kinematics model (Siciliano & Khatib, 2016), or a sensor model (Cadena et al., 2016)). In more recent years, and with the developments of machine learning techniques, approaches with less handengineered priors developed to solve spatial tasks ((Kahn et al., 2017; Quillen et al., 2018; Levine et al., 2018; Smolyanskiy et al., 2017) to name a few). However they tend to rule out the specificity of spatial experiences in favor of a global assessment of the agent's performance, leaving the question of the origin and structure of spatial knowledge largely open.

Deep neuroevolution and deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) algorithms are two popular approaches to policy search. The former is widely applicable and rather stable, but suffers from low sample efficiency. By contrast, the latter is more sample efficient, but the most sample efficient variants are also rather unstable and highly sensitive to hyper-parameter setting. So far, these families of methods have mostly been compared as competing tools. However, an emerging approach consists in combining them so as to get the best of both worlds. Two previously existing combinations use either a standard evolutionary algorithm or a goal exploration process together with the DDPG algorithm, a sample efficient off-policy deep RL algorithm. In this paper, we propose a different combination scheme using the simple cross-entropy method (CEM) and TD3, another off-policy deep RL algorithm which improves over DDPG. We evaluate the resulting algorithm, CEM-RL, on a set of benchmarks classically used in deep RL. We show that CEM-RL benefits from several advantages over its competitors and offers a satisfactory trade-off between performance and sample efficiency.

We present a method for Temporal Difference (TD) learning that addresses several challenges faced by robots learning to navigate in a marine environment. For improved data efficiency, our method reduces TD updates to Gaussian Process regression. To make predictions amenable to online settings, we introduce a sparse approximation with improved quality over current rejection-based sparse methods. We derive the predictive value function posterior and use the moments to obtain a new algorithm for model-free policy evaluation, SPGP-SARSA. With simple changes, we show SPGP-SARSA can be reduced to a model-based equivalent, SPGP-TD. We perform comprehensive simulation studies and also conduct physical learning trials with an underwater robot. Our results show SPGP-SARSA can outperform the state-of-the-art sparse method, replicate the prediction quality of its exact counterpart, and be applied to solve underwater navigation tasks.