Cutting-edge technology has captured remarkable images of Charlotte as an embryo but what's even more extraordinary is how this technology helped bring her to life. Charlotte, now nine weeks old, is one of the first babies in Australia to be born with the help of artificial intelligence. Of all the things her parents, Sarah-Eve Dumais Pelletier, 32, and Tim Keys, 33, thought would improve their chances of having a child of their own, a computer was not one of them. Yet, here their daughter is after they endured a painful 12 months of fertility struggles, two miscarriages and a failed round of IVF. The husband and wife, who live on the Sunshine Coast, are among 1000 patients taking part in an Australian-first trial using artificial intelligence in the embryo selection process during an IVF cycle.

This paper introduces new parameterizations of equilibrium neural networks, i.e. networks defined by implicit equations. This model class includes standard multilayer and residual networks as special cases. The new parameterization admits a Lipschitz bound during training via unconstrained optimization: no projections or barrier functions are required. Lipschitz bounds are a common proxy for robustness and appear in many generalization bounds. Furthermore, compared to previous works we show well-posedness (existence of solutions) under less restrictive conditions on the network weights and more natural assumptions on the activation functions: that they are monotone and slope restricted. These results are proved by establishing novel connections with convex optimization, operator splitting on non-Euclidean spaces, and contracting neural ODEs. In image classification experiments we show that the Lipschitz bounds are very accurate and improve robustness to adversarial attacks.

Intermittency is a common and challenging problem in demand forecasting. We introduce a new, unified framework for building intermittent demand forecasting models, which incorporates and allows to generalize existing methods in several directions. Our framework is based on extensions of well-established model-based methods to discrete-time renewal processes, which can parsimoniously account for patterns such as aging, clustering and quasi-periodicity in demand arrivals. The connection to discrete-time renewal processes allows not only for a principled extension of Croston-type models, but also for an natural inclusion of neural network based models---by replacing exponential smoothing with a recurrent neural network. We also demonstrate that modeling continuous-time demand arrivals, i.e., with a temporal point process, is possible via a trivial extension of our framework. This leads to more flexible modeling in scenarios where data of individual purchase orders are directly available with granular timestamps. Complementing this theoretical advancement, we demonstrate the efficacy of our framework for forecasting practice via an extensive empirical study on standard intermittent demand data sets, in which we report predictive accuracy in a variety of scenarios that compares favorably to the state of the art.

Humans explain inter-object relationships with semantic labels that demonstrate a high-level understanding required to perform complex Vision-Language tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, existing VQA models represent relationships as a combination of object-level visual features which constrain a model to express interactions between objects in a single domain, while the model is trying to solve a multi-modal task. In this paper, we propose a general purpose semantic relationship parser which generates a semantic feature vector for each subject-predicate-object triplet in an image, and a Mutual and Self Attention (MSA) mechanism that learns to identify relationship triplets that are important to answer the given question. To motivate the significance of semantic relationships, we show an oracle setting with ground-truth relationship triplets, where our model achieves a ~25% accuracy gain over the closest state-of-the-art model on the challenging GQA dataset. Further, with our semantic parser, we show that our model outperforms other comparable approaches on VQA and GQA datasets.

Sentence function is an important linguistic feature indicating the communicative purpose in uttering a sentence. Incorporating sentence functions into conversations has shown improvements in the quality of generated responses. However, the number of utterances for different types of fine-grained sentence functions is extremely imbalanced. Besides a small number of high-resource sentence functions, a large portion of sentence functions is infrequent. Consequently, dialogue generation conditioned on these infrequent sentence functions suffers from data deficiency. In this paper, we investigate a structured meta-learning (SML) approach for dialogue generation on infrequent sentence functions. We treat dialogue generation conditioned on different sentence functions as separate tasks, and apply model-agnostic meta-learning to high-resource sentence functions data. Furthermore, SML enhances meta-learning effectiveness by promoting knowledge customization among different sentence functions but simultaneously preserving knowledge generalization for similar sentence functions. Experimental results demonstrate that SML not only improves the informativeness and relevance of generated responses, but also can generate responses consistent with the target sentence functions.

In this paper we aim to explore the general robustness of neural network classifiers by utilizing adversarial as well as natural perturbations. Different from previous works which mainly focus on studying the robustness of neural networks against adversarial perturbations, we also evaluate their robustness on natural perturbations before and after robustification. After standardizing the comparison between adversarial and natural perturbations, we demonstrate that although adversarial training improves the performance of the networks against adversarial perturbations, it leads to drop in the performance for naturally perturbed samples besides clean samples. In contrast, natural perturbations like elastic deformations, occlusions and wave does not only improve the performance against natural perturbations, but also lead to improvement in the performance for the adversarial perturbations. Additionally they do not drop the accuracy on the clean images. A large body of work in computer vision and machine learning research focuses on studying the robustness of neural networks against adversarial perturbations (Kurakin et al., 2016; Goodfellow et al., 2014; Carlini & Wagner, 2017). Various defense based methods have also been proposed against these adversarial perturbations (Goodfellow et al., 2014; Madry et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2019b; Song et al., 2019).

End-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems aim to generate system responses directly from plain text inputs. There are two challenges for such systems: one is how to effectively incorporate external knowledge bases (KBs) into the learning framework; the other is how to accurately capture the semantics of dialogue history. In this paper, we address these two challenges by exploiting the graph structural information in the knowledge base and in the dependency parsing tree of the dialogue. To effectively leverage the structural information in dialogue history, we propose a new recurrent cell architecture which allows representation learning on graphs. To exploit the relations between entities in KBs, the model combines multi-hop reasoning ability based on the graph structure. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves consistent improvement over state-of-the-art models on two different task-oriented dialogue datasets.

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), i.e., finding collision-free paths for multiple robots, is important for many applications where small runtimes are important, including the kind of automated warehouses operated by Amazon. CBS is a leading two-level search algorithm for solving MAPF optimally. ECBS is a bounded-suboptimal variant of CBS that uses focal search to speed up CBS by sacrificing optimality and instead guaranteeing that the costs of its solution are within a given factor of optimal. In this paper, we study how to decrease its runtime even further using inadmissible heuristics. Motivated by Explicit Estimation Search (EES), we propose Explicit Estimation CBS (EECBS), a new bounded-suboptimal variant of CBS, that uses online learning to inadmissibly estimate the cost of the solution under each high-level node and uses EES to choose which high-level node to expand next. We also investigate recent improvements to CBS and adapt them to EECBS. We find that EECBS with the improvements runs significantly faster than the MAPF algorithms ECBS, BCP-7, and eMDD-SAT on a variety of MAPF instances. We hope that the scalability of EECBS enables wider adoption of MAPF formulations in practical applications.

Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1488 of our Trek, and our focus on Fridays is the future technological and societal advances, so we call it Futuristic Fridays. My personality is one that has always been very future-oriented.

A California startup is working on transforming a bomb sniffing robot into a device that detects coronavirus that claims to be faster than traditional testing. Koniku altered its Konikore device to detect Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC's) from breath, which is common for those infected with the virus. The'smell cyborg' mimics the look of a flying saucer and has a chip programmed to detect a certain scent, which triggers lights when it is identified. 'Our first products will be delivered to customers before the end of the year.' 'There are a variety of use cases for the Konikore, including hospitality, entertainment, transportation, logistics, defense, manufacturing and food.' A California startup is working on transforming a bomb sniffing robot into a device that detects coronavirus that claims to be faster than traditional testing.