To alleviate traffic congestion in urban areas, electronic toll collection (ETC) systems are deployed all over the world. Despite the merits, tolls are usually pre-determined and fixed from day to day, which fail to consider traffic dynamics and thus have limited regulation effect when traffic conditions are abnormal. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic ETC (DyETC) scheme which adjusts tolls to traffic conditions in realtime. The DyETC problem is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP), the solution of which is very challenging due to its 1) multi-dimensional state space, 2) multi-dimensional, continuous and bounded action space, and 3) time-dependent state and action values. Due to the complexity of the formulated MDP, existing methods cannot be applied to our problem. Therefore, we develop a novel algorithm, PG-beta, which makes three improvements to traditional policy gradient method by proposing 1) time-dependent value and policy functions, 2) Beta distribution policy function and 3) state abstraction. Experimental results show that, compared with existing ETC schemes, DyETC increases traffic volume by around 8%, and reduces travel time by around 14:6% during rush hour. Considering the total traffic volume in a traffic network, this contributes to a substantial increase to social welfare.

Graphical models offer techniques for capturing the structure of many problems in real-world domains and provide means for representation, interpretation, and inference. The modeling framework provides tools for discovering rules for solving problems by exploring structural relationships. We present the Structural Affinity method that uses graphical models for first learning and subsequently recognizing the pattern for solving problems on the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test of general human intelligence. Recently there has been considerable work on computational models of addressing the Raven's test using various representations ranging from fractals to symbolic structures. In contrast, our method uses Markov Random Fields parameterized by affinity factors to discover the structure in the geometric analogy problems and induce the rules of Carpenter et al.'s cognitive model of problem-solving on the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test. We provide a computational account that first learns the structure of a Raven's problem and then predicts the solution by computing the probability of the correct answer by recognizing patterns corresponding to Carpenter et al.'s rules. We demonstrate that the performance of our model on the Standard Raven Progressive Matrices is comparable with existing state of the art models.

Measuring semantic relatedness between two words is a significant problem in many areas such as natural language processing. Existing approaches to the semantic relatedness problem mainly adopt the co-occurrence principle and regard two words as highly related if they appear in the same sentence frequently. However, such solutions suffer from low coverage and low precision because i) the two highly related words may not appear close to each other in the sentences, e.g., the synonyms; and ii) the co-occurrence of words may happen by chance rather than implying the closeness in their semantics. In this paper, we explore the latent semantics (i.e., concepts) of the words to identify highly related word pairs. We propose a hierarchical association network to specify the complex relationships among the words and the concepts, and quantify each relationship with appropriate measurements. Extensive experiments are conducted on real datasets and the results show that our proposed method improves correlation precision compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

There is growing need for robots that can interact with people in everyday situations. For service robots, it is not reasonable to assume that one can pre-program all object categories. Instead, apart from learning from a batch of labelled training data, robots should continuously update and learn new object categories while working in the environment. This paper proposes a cognitive architecture designed to create a concurrent 3D object category learning and recognition in an interactive and open-ended manner. In particular, this cognitive architecture provides automatic perception capabilities that will allow robots to detect objects in highly crowded scenes and learn new object categories from the set of accumulated experiences in an incremental and open-ended way. Moreover, it supports constructing the full model of an unknown object in an on-line manner and predicting next best view for improving object detection and manipulation performance. We provide extensive experimental results demonstrating system performance in terms of recognition, scalability, next-best-view prediction and real-world robotic applications.

Driven by the wave of urbanization in recent decades, the research topic about migrant behavior analysis draws great attention from both academia and the government. Nevertheless, subject to the cost of data collection and the lack of modeling methods, most of existing studies use only questionnaire surveys with sparse samples and non-individual level statistical data to achieve coarse-grained studies of migrant behaviors. In this paper, a partially supervised cross-domain deep learning model named CD-CNN is proposed for migrant/native recognition using mobile phone signaling data as behavioral features and questionnaire survey data as incomplete labels. Specifically, CD-CNN features in decomposing the mobile data into location domain and communication domain, and adopts a joint learning framework that combines two convolutional neural networks with a feature balancing scheme. Moreover, CD-CNN employs a three-step algorithm for training, in which the co-training step is of great value to partially supervised cross-domain learning. Comparative experiments on the city Wuxi demonstrate the high predictive power of CD-CNN. Two interesting applications further highlight the ability of CD-CNN for in-depth migrant behavioral analysis.

Scenario planning is a commonly used method by companies to develop their long-term plans. Scenario planning for risk management puts an added emphasis on identifying and managing emerging risk. While a variety of methods have been proposed for this purpose, we show that applying AI planning techniques to devise possible scenarios provides a unique advantage for scenario planning. Our system, the Scenario Planning Advisor (SPA), takes as input the relevant information from news and social media, representing key risk drivers, as well as the domain knowledge and generates scenarios that explain the key risk drivers and describe the alternative futures. To this end, we provide a characterization of the problem, knowledge engineering methodology, and transformation to planning. Furthermore, we describe the computation of the scenarios, lessons learned, and the feedback received from the pilot deployment of the SPA system in IBM.

Aesthetic quality prediction is a challenging task in the computer vision community because of the complex interplay with semantic contents and photographic technologies. Recent studies on the powerful deep learning based aesthetic quality assessment usually use a binary high-low label or a numerical score to represent the aesthetic quality. However the scalar representation cannot describe well the underlying varieties of the human perception of aesthetics. In this work, we propose to predict the aesthetic score distribution (i.e., a score distribution vector of the ordinal basic human ratings) using Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). Conventional DCNNs which aim to minimize the difference between the predicted scalar numbers or vectors and the ground truth cannot be directly used for the ordinal basic rating distribution. Thus, a novel CNN based on the Cumulative distribution with Jensen-Shannon divergence (CJS-CNN) is presented to predict the aesthetic score distribution of human ratings, with a new reliability-sensitive learning method based on the kurtosis of the score distribution, which eliminates the requirement of the original full data of human ratings (without normalization). Experimental results on large scale aesthetic dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our introduced CJS-CNN in this task.

This paper proposes a computational approach for analysis of strokes in line drawings by artists. We aim at developing an AI methodology that facilitates attribution of drawings of unknown authors in a way that is not easy to be deceived by forged art. The methodology used is based on quantifying the characteristics of individual strokes in drawings. We propose a novel algorithm for segmenting individual strokes. We propose an approach that combines different hand-crafted and learned features for the task of quantifying stroke characteristics. We experimented with a dataset of 300 digitized drawings with over 80 thousands strokes. The collection mainly consisted of drawings of Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse, and Egon Schiele, besides a small number of representative works of other artists. The experiments shows that the proposed methodology can classify individual strokes with accuracy 70%-90%, and aggregate over drawings with accuracy above 80%, while being robust to be deceived by fakes.

We consider a decomposition method for compressive streaming data in the context of online compressive Robust Principle Component Analysis (RPCA). The proposed decomposition solves an $n$-$\ell_1$ cluster-weighted minimization to decompose a sequence of frames (or vectors), into sparse and low-rank components, from compressive measurements. Our method processes a data vector of the stream per time instance from a small number of measurements in contrast to conventional batch RPCA, which needs to access full data. The $n$-$\ell_1$ cluster-weighted minimization leverages the sparse components along with their correlations with multiple previously-recovered sparse vectors. Moreover, the proposed minimization can exploit the structures of sparse components via clustering and re-weighting iteratively. The method outperforms the existing methods for both numerical data and actual video data.

Neural samplers such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) or generative adversarial networks (GANs) approximate distributions by transforming samples from a simple random source---the latent space---to samples from a more complex distribution represented by a dataset. While the manifold hypothesis implies that the density induced by a dataset contains large regions of low density, the training criterions of VAEs and GANs will make the latent space densely covered. Consequently points that are separated by low-density regions in observation space will be pushed together in latent space, making stationary distances poor proxies for similarity. We transfer ideas from Riemannian geometry to this setting, letting the distance between two points be the shortest path on a Riemannian manifold induced by the transformation. The method yields a principled distance measure, provides a tool for visual inspection of deep generative models, and an alternative to linear interpolation in latent space. In addition, it can be applied for robot movement generalization using previously learned skills. The method is evaluated on a synthetic dataset with known ground truth; on a simulated robot arm dataset; on human motion capture data; and on a generative model of handwritten digits.