The startup scenario is being changed by bringing in investment and deal activity around intelligent automation and artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning. The data plainly demonstrates that new businesses that had AI as a core product are creating narrow AI tech packed away with the heaviest investment from leading VC firms and investors who are putting vigorously in deep tech startups in big data, enterprise AI and automation. It likewise underscores a great part of the financing going on in domain explicit breakthrough innovations, and not broadly useful AI tech. Investment funds, venture capital (VC) firms and corporate financial specialists are venturing up equity investments in artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups, mirroring a developing worldwide interest for AI advances and their business applications. The aggregate sum contributed and the worldwide number of deals has expanded enormously since 2011, yet wide varieties in investment profiles develop among nations and areas.

University researchers from Hong Kong and China created an application called DeepFaceDrawing that "allows users with little training in drawing to produce high-quality images from rough or even incomplete freehand sketches."

Army Lt. Gen. John N.T. ''Jack'' Shanahan spoke remotely from the Pentagon yesterday with Dave Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. ''It is my conviction and deep passion that AI will transform the character of warfare in the Department of Defense in the course of the next 20 years,'' Shanahan said. ''There is no part of the department that will not be impacted by this, from the back office to the battlefield, from under sea to cyberspace and outer space, and all points in between.'' Artificial intelligence, often called AI, has been happening in commercial industry, but that effort only started in earnest in the department about 10 years ago, he noted, but ''we've been stuck in first gear in terms of fielding.'' DOD has long struggled with how to take the world's best research and development and field it at speed and at scale, he added.

This paper describes the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to multi-product inventory management in supply chains. The problem description and solution are both adapted from a real-world business solution. The novelty of this problem with respect to supply chain literature is (i) we consider concurrent inventory management of a large number (50 to 1000) of products with shared capacity, (ii) we consider a multi-node supply chain consisting of a warehouse which supplies three stores, (iii) the warehouse, stores, and transportation from warehouse to stores have finite capacities, (iv) warehouse and store replenishment happen at different time scales and with realistic time lags, and (v) demand for products at the stores is stochastic. We describe a novel formulation in a multi-agent (hierarchical) reinforcement learning framework that can be used for parallelised decision-making, and use the advantage actor critic (A2C) algorithm with quantised action spaces to solve the problem. Experiments show that the proposed approach is able to handle a multi-objective reward comprised of maximising product sales and minimising wastage of perishable products.

Chengrun Yang, Jicong Fan, Ziyang Wu, and Madeleine Udell This is an extended version of AutoML Pipeline Selection: Efficiently Navigating the Combinatorial Space (DOI: 10.1145/3394486.3403197) at the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2020. Abstract--Data scientists seeking a good supervised learning model on a new dataset have many choices to make: they must preprocess the data, select features, possibly reduce the dimension, select an estimation algorithm, and choose hyperparameters for each of these pipeline components. With new pipeline components comes a combinatorial explosion in the number of choices! In this work, we design a new AutoML system to address this challenge: an automated system to design a supervised learning pipeline. Our system uses matrix and tensor factorization as surrogate models to model the combinatorial pipeline search space.

Agile control of mobile manipulator is challenging because of the high complexity coupled by the robotic system and the unstructured working environment. Tracking and grasping a dynamic object with a random trajectory is even harder. In this paper, a multi-task reinforcement learning-based mobile manipulation control framework is proposed to achieve general dynamic object tracking and grasping. Several basic types of dynamic trajectories are chosen as the task training set. To improve the policy generalization in practice, random noise and dynamics randomization are introduced during the training process. Extensive experiments show that our policy trained can adapt to unseen random dynamic trajectories with about 0.1m tracking error and 75\% grasping success rate of dynamic objects. The trained policy can also be successfully deployed on a real mobile manipulator.

The lack of interpretability in current deep learning models causes serious concerns as they are extensively used for various life-critical applications. Hence, it is of paramount importance to develop interpretable deep learning models. In this paper, we consider the problem of blind deconvolution and propose a novel model-aware deep architecture that allows for the recovery of both the blur kernel and the sharp image from the blurred image. In particular, we propose the Deep Unfolded Richardson-Lucy (Deep-URL) framework -- an interpretable deep-learning architecture that can be seen as an amalgamation of classical estimation technique and deep neural network, and consequently leads to improved performance. Our numerical investigations demonstrate significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are emerging machine learning models on graphs. Although sufficiently deep GNNs are shown theoretically capable of fully preserving graph structures, most existing GNN models in practice are shallow and essentially feature-centric. We show empirically and analytically that the existing shallow GNNs cannot preserve graph structures well. To overcome this fundamental challenge, we propose Eigen-GNN, a simple yet effective and general plug-in module to boost GNNs ability in preserving graph structures. Specifically, we integrate the eigenspace of graph structures with GNNs by treating GNNs as a type of dimensionality reduction and expanding the initial dimensionality reduction bases. Without needing to increase depths, Eigen-GNN possesses more flexibilities in handling both feature-driven and structure-driven tasks since the initial bases contain both node features and graph structures. We present extensive experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of Eigen-GNN for tasks including node classification, link prediction, and graph isomorphism tests.

We propose a multi-head attention mechanism as a blending layer in a neural network model that translates natural language to a high level behavioral language for indoor robot navigation. We follow the framework established by (Zang et al., 2018a) that proposes the use of a navigation graph as a knowledge base for the task. Our results show significant performance gains when translating instructions on previously unseen environments, therefore, improving the generalization capabilities of the model.

We address the problem of Federated Learning (FL) where users are distributed and partitioned into clusters. This setup captures settings where different groups of users have their own objectives (learning tasks) but by aggregating their data with others in the same cluster (same learning task), they can leverage the strength in numbers in order to perform more efficient Federated Learning. We propose a new framework dubbed the Iterative Federated Clustering Algorithm (IFCA), which alternately estimates the cluster identities of the users and optimizes model parameters for the user clusters via gradient descent. We analyze the convergence rate of this algorithm first in a linear model with squared loss and then for generic strongly convex and smooth loss functions. We show that in both settings, with good initialization, IFCA converges at an exponential rate, and discuss the optimality of the statistical error rate. In the experiments, we show that our algorithm can succeed even if we relax the requirements on initialization with random initialization and multiple restarts. We also present experimental results showing that our algorithm is efficient in non-convex problems such as neural networks and outperforms the baselines on several clustered FL benchmarks created based on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets by $5\sim 8\%$.