South America
Quaternion Convolutional Neural Networks: Current Advances and Future Directions
Altamirano-Gomez, Gerardo, Gershenson, Carlos
Since their first applications, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have solved problems that have advanced the state-of-the-art in several domains. CNNs represent information using real numbers. Despite encouraging results, theoretical analysis shows that representations such as hyper-complex numbers can achieve richer representational capacities than real numbers, and that Hamilton products can capture intrinsic interchannel relationships. Moreover, in the last few years, experimental research has shown that Quaternion-Valued CNNs (QCNNs) can achieve similar performance with fewer parameters than their real-valued counterparts. This paper condenses research in the development of QCNNs from its very beginnings. We propose a conceptual organization of current trends and analyze the main building blocks used in the design of QCNN models. Based on this conceptual organization, we propose future directions of research.
Human Emergency Detection during Autonomous Hospital Transports
Zachariae, Andreas, Widera, Julia, Plahl, Frederik, Hein, Björn, Wurll, Christian
Human transports in hospitals are labor-intensive and primarily performed in beds to save time. This transfer method does not promote the mobility or autonomy of the patient. To relieve the caregivers from this time-consuming task, a mobile robot is developed to autonomously transport humans around the hospital. It provides different transfer modes including walking and sitting in a wheelchair. The problem that this paper focuses on is to detect emergencies and ensure the well-being of the patient during the transport. For this purpose, the patient is tracked and monitored with a camera system. OpenPose is used for Human Pose Estimation and a trained classifier for emergency detection. We collected and published a dataset of 18,000 images in lab and hospital environments. It differs from related work because we have a moving robot with different transfer modes in a highly dynamic environment with multiple people in the scene using only RGB-D data. To improve the critical recall metric, we apply threshold moving and a time delay. We compare different models with an AutoML approach. This paper shows that emergencies while walking are best detected by a SVM with a recall of 95.8% on single frames. In the case of sitting transport, the best model achieves a recall of 62.2%. The contribution is to establish a baseline on this new dataset and to provide a proof of concept for the human emergency detection in this use case.
Formulating A Strategic Plan Based On Statistical Analyses And Applications For Financial Companies Through A Real-World Use Case
Formulating a strategic plan aligned with a company's business scope allows the company to explore data-driven ways of business improvement and risk mitigation quantitively while utilizing collected data to perform statistical applications. The company's business leadership generally organizes joint meetings with internal or external data analysis teams to design a plan for executing business-related statistical analysis. Such projects demonstrate that the company should invest in what areas and adjust the budget for business verticals with low revenue. Furthermore, statistical applications can determine the logic of how to improve staff performance in the workplace. LendingClub, as a peer-to-peer lending company, offers loans and investment products in different sectors, including personal and business loans, automobile loans, and health-related financing loans. LendingClub's business model comprises three primary players: borrowers, investors, and portfolios for issued loans. LendingClub is about expanding the statistical analytics that consists of infrastructure and software algorithm applications to develop two meaningful solutions ultimately: a) estimating durations in which clients will pay off loans; and b) 30-minute loan approval decision-making. To implement these two capabilities, the company has collected data on loans that were granted or rejected over 12 years, including 145 attributes and more than 2 million observations, where 32 features have no missing values across the dataset.
Fuzzy Alignments in Directed Acyclic Graph for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation
Ma, Zhengrui, Shao, Chenze, Gui, Shangtong, Zhang, Min, Feng, Yang
Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) reduces the decoding latency but suffers from performance degradation due to the multi-modality problem. Recently, the structure of directed acyclic graph has achieved great success in NAT, which tackles the multi-modality problem by introducing dependency between vertices. However, training it with negative log-likelihood loss implicitly requires a strict alignment between reference tokens and vertices, weakening its ability to handle multiple translation modalities. In this paper, we hold the view that all paths in the graph are fuzzily aligned with the reference sentence. We do not require the exact alignment but train the model to maximize a fuzzy alignment score between the graph and reference, which takes captured translations in all modalities into account. Extensive experiments on major WMT benchmarks show that our method substantially improves translation performance and increases prediction confidence, setting a new state of the art for NAT on the raw training data.
Multi-Objective GFlowNets
Jain, Moksh, Raparthy, Sharath Chandra, Hernandez-Garcia, Alex, Rector-Brooks, Jarrid, Bengio, Yoshua, Miret, Santiago, Bengio, Emmanuel
We study the problem of generating diverse candidates in the context of Multi-Objective Optimization. In many applications of machine learning such as drug discovery and material design, the goal is to generate candidates which simultaneously optimize a set of potentially conflicting objectives. Moreover, these objectives are often imperfect evaluations of some underlying property of interest, making it important to generate diverse candidates to have multiple options for expensive downstream evaluations. We propose Multi-Objective GFlowNets (MOGFNs), a novel method for generating diverse Pareto optimal solutions, based on GFlowNets. We introduce two variants of MOGFNs: MOGFN-PC, which models a family of independent sub-problems defined by a scalarization function, with reward-conditional GFlowNets, and MOGFN-AL, which solves a sequence of sub-problems defined by an acquisition function in an active learning loop. Our experiments on wide variety of synthetic and benchmark tasks demonstrate advantages of the proposed methods in terms of the Pareto performance and importantly, improved candidate diversity, which is the main contribution of this work.
Robot motor learning shows emergence of frequency-modulated, robust swimming with an invariant Strouhal-number
Deng, Hankun, Li, Donghao, Nitroy, Colin, Wertz, Andrew, Priya, Shashank, Cheng, Bo
Fish locomotion emerges from a diversity of interactions among deformable structures, surrounding fluids and neuromuscular activations, i.e., fluid-structure interactions (FSI) controlled by fish's motor systems. Previous studies suggested that such motor-controlled FSI may possess embodied traits. However, their implications in motor learning, neuromuscular control, gait generation, and swimming performance remain to be uncovered. Using robot models, we studied how swimming behaviours emerged from the FSI and the embodied traits. We developed modular robots with various designs and used Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) to control the torque acting on robot body. We used reinforcement learning to learn CPG parameters to maximize the swimming speed. The results showed that motor frequency converged faster than other parameters, and the emergent swimming gaits were robust against disruptions applied to motor control. For all robots and frequencies tested, swimming speed was proportional to the mean undulation velocity of body and caudal-fin combined, yielding an invariant, undulation-based Strouhal number. The Strouhal number also revealed two fundamental classes of undulatory swimming in both biological and robotic fishes. The robot actuators also demonstrated diverse functions as motors, virtual springs, and virtual masses. These results provide novel insights into the embodied traits of motor-controlled FSI for fish-inspired locomotion.
Heterogeneous graphs model spatial relationships between biological entities for breast cancer diagnosis
K, Akhila Krishna, Gupta, Ravi Kant, Kurian, Nikhil Cherian, Jeevan, Pranav, Sethi, Amit
The heterogeneity of breast cancer presents considerable challenges for its early detection, prognosis, and treatment selection. Convolutional neural networks often neglect the spatial relationships within histopathological images, which can limit their accuracy. Graph neural networks (GNNs) offer a promising solution by coding the spatial relationships within images. Prior studies have investigated the modeling of histopathological images as cell and tissue graphs, but they have not fully tapped into the potential of extracting interrelationships between these biological entities. In this paper, we present a novel approach using a heterogeneous GNN that captures the spatial and hierarchical relations between cell and tissue graphs to enhance the extraction of useful information from histopathological images. We also compare the performance of a cross-attention-based network and a transformer architecture for modeling the intricate relationships within tissue and cell graphs. Our model demonstrates superior efficiency in terms of parameter count and achieves higher accuracy compared to the transformer-based state-of-the-art approach on three publicly available breast cancer datasets -- BRIGHT, BreakHis, and BACH.
Using Decision Trees for Interpretable Supervised Clustering
Kokash, Natallia, Makhnist, Leonid
In this paper, we address an issue of finding explainable clusters of class-uniform data in labelled datasets. The issue falls into the domain of interpretable supervised clustering. Unlike traditional clustering, supervised clustering aims at forming clusters of labelled data with high probability densities. We are particularly interested in finding clusters of data of a given class and describing the clusters with the set of comprehensive rules. We propose an iterative method to extract high-density clusters with the help of decisiontree-based classifiers as the most intuitive learning method, and discuss the method of node selection to maximize quality of identified groups.
Automated Polynomial Filter Learning for Graph Neural Networks
Yu, Wendi, Hou, Zhichao, Liu, Xiaorui
Polynomial graph filters have been widely used as guiding principles in the design of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Recently, the adaptive learning of the polynomial graph filters has demonstrated promising performance for modeling graph signals on both homophilic and heterophilic graphs, owning to their flexibility and expressiveness. In this work, we conduct a novel preliminary study to explore the potential and limitations of polynomial graph filter learning approaches, revealing a severe overfitting issue. To improve the effectiveness of polynomial graph filters, we propose Auto-Polynomial, a novel and general automated polynomial graph filter learning framework that efficiently learns better filters capable of adapting to various complex graph signals. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate significant and consistent performance improvements on both homophilic and heterophilic graphs across multiple learning settings considering various labeling ratios, which unleashes the potential of polynomial filter learning.
Towards Fair Disentangled Online Learning for Changing Environments
Zhao, Chen, Mi, Feng, Wu, Xintao, Jiang, Kai, Khan, Latifur, Grant, Christan, Chen, Feng
In the problem of online learning for changing environments, data are sequentially received one after another over time, and their distribution assumptions may vary frequently. Although existing methods demonstrate the effectiveness of their learning algorithms by providing a tight bound on either dynamic regret or adaptive regret, most of them completely ignore learning with model fairness, defined as the statistical parity across different sub-population (e.g., race and gender). Another drawback is that when adapting to a new environment, an online learner needs to update model parameters with a global change, which is costly and inefficient. Inspired by the sparse mechanism shift hypothesis, we claim that changing environments in online learning can be attributed to partial changes in learned parameters that are specific to environments and the rest remain invariant to changing environments. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm under the assumption that data collected at each time can be disentangled with two representations, an environment-invariant semantic factor and an environment-specific variation factor. The semantic factor is further used for fair prediction under a group fairness constraint. To evaluate the sequence of model parameters generated by the learner, a novel regret is proposed in which it takes a mixed form of dynamic and static regret metrics followed by a fairness-aware long-term constraint. The detailed analysis provides theoretical guarantees for loss regret and violation of cumulative fairness constraints. Empirical evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate our proposed method sequentially outperforms baseline methods in model accuracy and fairness.