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Generalized Planning: Non-Deterministic Abstractions and Trajectory Constraints

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study the characterization and computation of general policies for families of problems that share a structure characterized by a common reduction into a single abstract problem. Policies $\mu$ that solve the abstract problem P have been shown to solve all problems Q that reduce to P provided that $\mu$ terminates in Q. In this work, we shed light on why this termination condition is needed and how it can be removed. The key observation is that the abstract problem P captures the common structure among the concrete problems Q that is local (Markovian) but misses common structure that is global. We show how such global structure can be captured by means of trajectory constraints that in many cases can be expressed as LTL formulas, thus reducing generalized planning to LTL synthesis. Moreover, for a broad class of problems that involve integer variables that can be increased or decreased, trajectory constraints can be compiled away, reducing generalized planning to fully observable non-deterministic planning.


A Decision-Based Dynamic Ensemble Selection Method for Concept Drift

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Abstract--We propose an online method for concept drift detection based on dynamic classifier ensemble selection. T he proposed method generates a pool of ensembles by promoting diversity among classifier members and chooses expert ensem bles according to global prequential accuracy values. Unlike cu rrent dynamic ensemble selection approaches that use only local k nowl-edge to select the most competent ensemble for each instance, our method focuses on selection taking into account the deci sion space. Consequently, it is well adapted to the context of dri ft detection in data stream problems. The results of the experi ments show that the proposed method attained the highest detectio n precision and the lowest number of false alarms, besides compet itive classification accuracy rates, in artificial datasets repre senting different types of drifts. Moreover, it outperformed basel ines in different real-problem datasets in terms of classification accuracy. Practical tasks, such as identification of customer preferences, Internet log analysis, among others, are examples of data stream problems. In this context, the so-called concep t drift phenomenon may occur, since when data are continuousl y generated in streams, data and target concepts may change over time. Algorithms designed to deal with drift may be divided into two main groups: (1) online - when one instance is learned at a time upon arrival; and (2) block-based - when chunks of samples are presented from time to time [1]. Online methods are very useful in data stream environments, especially due to three main reasons: samples arrive sequential ly; data usually must be processed in high volumes at fast paces; and each data instance is read only once. Different categories of online methods are available in the literature. Drift detectors are common solutions.


B-Spline CNNs on Lie Groups

arXiv.org Machine Learning

A BSTRACT Group convolutional neural networks (G-CNNs) can be used to improve classical CNNs by equipping them with the geometric structure of groups. Central in the success of G-CNNs is the lifting of feature maps to higher dimensional disentangled representations, in which data characteristics are effectively learned, geometric data-augmentations are made obsolete, and predictable behavior under geometric transformations (equivariance) is guaranteed via group theory. Currently, however, the practical implementations of G-CNNs are limited to either discrete groups (that leave the grid intact) or continuous compact groups such as rotations (that enable the use of Fourier theory). In this paper we lift these limitations and propose a modular framework for the design and implementation of G-CNNs for arbitrary Lie groups . In our approach the differential structure of Lie groups is used to expand convolution kernels in a generic basis of B-splines that is defined on the Lie algebra. This leads to a flexible framework that enables localized, atrous, and deformable convolutions in G-CNNs by means of respectively localized, sparse and nonuniform B-spline expansions. The impact and potential of our approach is studied on two benchmark datasets: cancer detection in histopathology slides in which rotation equivariance plays a key role and facial landmark localization in which scale equivariance is important. In both cases, G-CNN architectures outperform their classical 2D counterparts and the added value of atrous and localized group convolutions is studied in detail. 1 I NTRODUCTION Group convolutional neural networks (G-CNNs) are as a class of neural networks that are equipped with the geometry of groups. This enables them to profit from the structure and symmetries in signal data such as images (Cohen & Welling, 2016). A key feature of G-CNNs is that they are equivariant with respect to transformations described by the group, i.e., they guarantee predictable behavior under such transformations and are insensitive to both local and global transformations on the input data. Classical CNNs are a special case of G-CNNs that are equivariant to translations and, in contrast to unconstrained NNs, they make advantage of (and preserve) the basic structure of signal data throughout the network (LeCun et al., 1990). Part of the success of G-CNNs can be attributed to the lifting of feature maps to higher dimensional objects that are generated by matching kernels under a range of poses (transformations in the group).


Adversarial Variational Domain Adaptation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this work we address the problem of transferring knowledge obtained from a vast annotated source domain to a low labeled or unlabeled target domain. We propose Adversarial Variational Domain Adaptation (AVDA), a semi-supervised domain adaptation method based on deep variational embedded representations. We use approximate inference and adversarial methods to map samples from source and target domains into an aligned semantic embedding. We show that on a semi-supervised few-shot scenario, our approach can be used to obtain a significant speed-up in performance when using an increasing number of labels on the target domain.


On Understanding Knowledge Graph Representation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Many methods have been developed to represent knowledge graph data, which implicitly exploit low-rank latent structure in the data to encode known information and enable unknown facts to be inferred. To predict whether a relationship holds between entities, their embeddings are typically compared in the latent space following a relation-specific mapping. Whilst link prediction has steadily improved, the latent structure, and hence why such models capture semantic information, remains unexplained. We build on recent theoretical interpretation of word embeddings as a basis to consider an explicit structure for representations of relations between entities. For identifiable relation types, we are able to predict properties and justify the relative performance of leading knowledge graph representation methods, including their often overlooked ability to make independent predictions.


Mining Human Mobility Data to Discover Locations and Habits

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Many aspects of life are associated with places of human mobility patterns and nowadays we are facing an increase in the pervasiveness of mobile devices these individuals carry. Positioning technologies that serve these devices such as the cellular antenna (GSM networks), global navigation satellite systems (GPS), and more recently the WiFi positioning system (WPS) provide large amounts of spatio-temporal data in a continuous way. Therefore, detecting significant places and the frequency of movements between them is fundamental to understand human behavior. In this paper, we propose a method for discovering user habits without any a priori or external knowledge by introducing a density-based clustering for spatio-temporal data to identify meaningful places and by applying a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) over the set of meaningful places to identify the representations of individual habits. To evaluate the proposed method we use two real-world datasets. One dataset contains high-density GPS data and the other one contains GSM mobile phone data in a coarse representation. The results show that the proposed method is suitable for this task as many unique habits were identified. This can be used for understanding users' behavior and to draw their characterizing profiles having a panorama of the mobility patterns from the data.


Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Time Series Classification

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on time series classification (TSC) tasks. In this work, we focus on leveraging DNNs in the often-encountered practical scenario where access to labeled training data is difficult, and where DNNs would be prone to overfitting. We leverage recent advancements in gradient-based meta-learning, and propose an approach to train a residual neural network with convolutional layers as a meta-learning agent for few-shot TSC. The network is trained on a diverse set of few-shot tasks sampled from various domains (e.g. healthcare, activity recognition, etc.) such that it can solve a target task from another domain using only a small number of training samples from the target task. Most existing meta-learning approaches are limited in practice as they assume a fixed number of target classes across tasks. We overcome this limitation in order to train a common agent across domains with each domain having different number of target classes, we utilize a triplet-loss based learning procedure that does not require any constraints to be enforced on the number of classes for the few-shot TSC tasks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use meta-learning based pre-training for TSC. Our approach sets a new benchmark for few-shot TSC, outperforming several strong baselines on few-shot tasks sampled from 41 datasets in UCR TSC Archive. We observe that pre-training under the meta-learning paradigm allows the network to quickly adapt to new unseen tasks with small number of labeled instances.


Environment Sound Classification using Multiple Feature Channels and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

--In this paper, we propose a model for the Environment Sound Classification T ask (ESC) that consists of multiple feature channels given as input to a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The novelty of the paper lies in using multiple feature channels consisting of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Gammatone Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (GFCC), the Constant Q-transform (CQT) and Chromagram. Such multiple features have never been used before for signal or audio processing. Also, we employ a deeper CNN (DCNN) compared to previous models, consisting of 2D separable convolutions working on time and feature domain separately. The model also consists of max pooling layers that downsample time and feature domain separately. We use some data augmentation techniques to further boost performance. Our model is able to achieve state-of- the-art performance on all three benchmark environment sound classification datasets, i.e. the UrbanSound8K (97.35%), T o the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a single environment sound classification model is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on all three datasets. For ESC-10 and ESC-50 datasets, the accuracy achieved by the proposed model is beyond human accuracy of 95.7% and 81.3% respectively. I NTRODUCTION T HERE are many important applications related to speech and audio processing. One of the most important application is the Environment Sound Classification (ESC) that deals with distinguishing between sounds from the real environment. It is a complex task that involves classifying a sound event into an appropriate class such as siren, dog barking, airplane, people talking etc. This task is quite different compared to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) [1], since environment sound features differ drastically from speech sounds. In ASR, speech is converted to text. However, in ESC, there is no such thing as speech, just sounds. So, ESC models are quite different compared to ASR models.


EEG-Based Driver Drowsiness Estimation Using Feature Weighted Episodic Training

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Drowsy driving is pervasive, and also a major cause of traffic accidents. Estimating a driver's drowsiness level by monitoring the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal and taking preventative actions accordingly may improve driving safety. However, individual differences among different drivers make this task very challenging. A calibration session is usually required to collect some subject-specific data and tune the model parameters before applying it to a new subject, which is very inconvenient and not user-friendly. Many approaches have been proposed to reduce the calibration effort, but few can completely eliminate it. This paper proposes a novel approach, feature weighted episodic training (FWET), to completely eliminate the calibration requirement. It integrates two techniques: feature weighting to learn the importance of different features, and episodic training for domain generalization. Experiments on EEG-based driver drowsiness estimation demonstrated that both feature weighting and episodic training are effective, and their integration can further improve the generalization performance. FWET does not need any labelled or unlabelled calibration data from the new subject, and hence could be very useful in plug-and-play brain-computer interfaces.


Four education startups that keep you learning into adulthood

#artificialintelligence

Today, education doesn't stop after students graduate; many continue learning throughout their life. And in addition to adult learning courses at colleges and universities, a lot of courses are now offered online – ranging from MOOCs ("massive open online course") to many apps. At the Global Education & Skills Forum in March, two of the 10 finalists were lifelong learning startups. Here are four of the most promising EdTech startups around. Don't have time to read a book a day?