Most research in the area of automatic essay grading (AEG) is geared towards scoring the essay holistically while there has also been some work done on scoring individual essay traits. In this paper, we describe a way to score essays holistically using a multi-task learning (MTL) approach, where scoring the essay holistically is the primary task, and scoring the essay traits is the auxiliary task. We compare our results with a single-task learning (STL) approach, using both LSTMs and BiLSTMs. We also compare our results of the auxiliary task with such tasks done in other AEG systems. To find out which traits work best for different types of essays, we conduct ablation tests for each of the essay traits. We also report the runtime and number of training parameters for each system. We find that MTL-based BiLSTM system gives the best results for scoring the essay holistically, as well as performing well on scoring the essay traits.

A smart healthcare system that supports clinicians for risk-calibrated treatment assessment typically requires the accurate modeling of time-to-event outcomes. To tackle this sequential treatment effect estimation problem, we developed causal dynamic survival model (CDSM) for causal inference with survival outcomes using longitudinal electronic health record (EHR). CDSM has impressive explanatory performance while maintaining the prediction capability of conventional binary neural network predictors. It borrows the strength from explanatory framework including the survival analysis and counterfactual framework and integrates them with the prediction power from a deep Bayesian recurrent neural network to extract implicit knowledge from EHR data. In two large clinical cohort studies, our model identified the conditional average treatment effect in accordance with previous literature yet detected individual effect heterogeneity over time and patient subgroups. The model provides individualized and clinically interpretable treatment effect estimations to improve patient outcomes.

SYDNEY – BGI Group, the world's largest genomics company, has worked with China's military on research that ranges from mass testing for respiratory pathogens to brain science, a review of research, patent filings and other documents has found. The review, of more than 40 publicly available documents and research papers in Chinese and English, shows BGI's links to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) include research with China's top military supercomputing experts. The extent of those links has not previously been reported. BGI has sold millions of COVID-19 test kits outside China since the outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic, including to Europe, Australia and the United States. Shares of BGI Genomics Co., the company's subsidiary listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange, have doubled in price over the past 12 months, giving it a market value of about $9 billion.

Training artificial neural networks requires the optimization of highly non-convex loss functions. Throughout the years, the scientific community has developed an extensive set of tools and architectures that render this optimization task tractable and a general intuition has been developed for choosing hyper parameters that help the models reach minima that generalize well to unseen data. However, for the most part, the difference in trainability in between architectures, tasks and even the gap in network generalization abilities still remain unexplained. Visualization tools have played a key role in uncovering key geometric characteristics of the loss-landscape of ANNs and how they impact trainability and generalization capabilities. However, most visualizations methods proposed so far have been relatively limited in their capabilities since they are of linear nature and only capture features in a limited number of dimensions. We propose the use of the modern dimensionality reduction method PHATE which represents the SOTA in terms of capturing both global and local structures of high-dimensional data. We apply this method to visualize the loss landscape during and after training. Our visualizations reveal differences in training trajectories and generalization capabilities when used to make comparisons between optimization methods, initializations, architectures, and datasets. Given this success we anticipate this method to be used in making informed choices about these aspects of neural networks.

Rocket and MiniRocket, while two of the fastest methods for time series classification, are both somewhat less accurate than the current most accurate methods (namely, HIVE-COTE and its variants). We show that it is possible to significantly improve the accuracy of MiniRocket (and Rocket), with some additional computational expense, by expanding the set of features produced by the transform, making MultiRocket (for MiniRocket with Multiple Features) overall the single most accurate method on the datasets in the UCR archive, while still being orders of magnitude faster than any algorithm of comparable accuracy other than its precursors.

In many cases, it is difficult to generate highly accurate models for time series data using a known parametric model structure. In response, an increasing body of research focuses on using neural networks to model time series approximately. A common assumption in training neural networks on time series is that the errors at different time steps are uncorrelated. However, due to the temporality of the data, errors are actually autocorrelated in many cases, which makes such maximum likelihood estimation inaccurate. In this paper, we propose to learn the autocorrelation coefficient jointly with the model parameters in order to adjust for autocorrelated errors. For time series regression, large-scale experiments indicate that our method outperforms the Prais-Winsten method, especially when the autocorrelation is strong. Furthermore, we broaden our method to time series forecasting and apply it with various state-of-the-art models. Results across a wide range of real-world datasets show that our method enhances performance in almost all cases.

Cycling is a promising sustainable mode for commuting and leisure in cities, however, the fear of getting hit or fall reduces its wide expansion as a commuting mode. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called CyclingNet for detecting cycling near misses from video streams generated by a mounted frontal camera on a bike regardless of the camera position, the conditions of the built, the visual conditions and without any restrictions on the riding behaviour. CyclingNet is a deep computer vision model based on convolutional structure embedded with self-attention bidirectional long-short term memory (LSTM) blocks that aim to understand near misses from both sequential images of scenes and their optical flows. The model is trained on scenes of both safe rides and near misses. After 42 hours of training on a single GPU, the model shows high accuracy on the training, testing and validation sets. The model is intended to be used for generating information that can draw significant conclusions regarding cycling behaviour in cities and elsewhere, which could help planners and policy-makers to better understand the requirement of safety measures when designing infrastructure or drawing policies. As for future work, the model can be pipelined with other state-of-the-art classifiers and object detectors simultaneously to understand the causality of near misses based on factors related to interactions of road-users, the built and the natural environments.

Recent developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) demonstrate that large-scale, self-supervised pre-training can be extremely beneficial for downstream tasks. These ideas have been adapted to other domains, including the analysis of the amino acid sequences of proteins. However, to date most attempts on protein sequences rely on direct masked language model style pre-training. In this work, we design a new, adversarial pre-training method for proteins, extending and specializing similar advances in NLP. We show compelling results in comparison to traditional MLM pre-training, though further development is needed to ensure the gains are worth the significant computational cost.

High-dimensional graphical models are often estimated using regularization that is aimed at reducing the number of edges in a network. In this work, we show how even simpler networks can be produced by aggregating the nodes of the graphical model. We develop a new convex regularized method, called the tree-aggregated graphical lasso or tag-lasso, that estimates graphical models that are both edge-sparse and node-aggregated. The aggregation is performed in a data-driven fashion by leveraging side information in the form of a tree that encodes node similarity and facilitates the interpretation of the resulting aggregated nodes. We provide an efficient implementation of the tag-lasso by using the locally adaptive alternating direction method of multipliers and illustrate our proposal's practical advantages in simulation and in applications in finance and biology.

Navigation problems under unknown varying conditions are among the most important and well-studied problems in the control field. Classic model-based adaptive control methods can be applied only when a convenient model of the plant or environment is provided. Recent model-free adaptive control methods aim at removing this dependency by learning the physical characteristics of the plant and/or process directly from sensor feedback. Although there have been prior attempts at improving these techniques, it remains an open question as to whether it is possible to cope with real-world uncertainties in a control system that is fully based on either paradigm. We propose a conceptually simple learning-based approach composed of a full state feedback controller, tuned robustly by a deep reinforcement learning framework based on the Soft Actor-Critic algorithm. We compare it, in realistic simulations, to a model-free controller that uses the same deep reinforcement learning framework for the control of a micro aerial vehicle under wind gust. The results indicate the great potential of learning-based adaptive control methods in modern dynamical systems.