Identifying semantically identical questions on, Question and Answering social media platforms like Quora is exceptionally significant to ensure that the quality and the quantity of content are presented to users, based on the intent of the question and thus enriching overall user experience. Detecting duplicate questions is a challenging problem because natural language is very expressive, and a unique intent can be conveyed using different words, phrases, and sentence structuring. Machine learning and deep learning methods are known to have accomplished superior results over traditional natural language processing techniques in identifying similar texts. In this paper, taking Quora for our case study, we explored and applied different machine learning and deep learning techniques on the task of identifying duplicate questions on Quora's dataset. By using feature engineering, feature importance techniques, and experimenting with seven selected machine learning classifiers, we demonstrated that our models outperformed previous studies on this task. Xgboost model with character level term frequency and inverse term frequency is our best machine learning model that has also outperformed a few of the Deep learning baseline models. We applied deep learning techniques to model four different deep neural networks of multiple layers consisting of Glove embeddings, Long Short Term Memory, Convolution, Max pooling, Dense, Batch Normalization, Activation functions, and model merge. Our deep learning models achieved better accuracy than machine learning models. Three out of four proposed architectures outperformed the accuracy from previous machine learning and deep learning research work, two out of four models outperformed accuracy from previous deep learning study on Quora's question pair dataset, and our best model achieved accuracy of 85.82% which is close to Quora state of the art accuracy.

The global sports betting market is worth an estimated $700 billion annually Flepp et al. (2017), and association football (also known as soccer or simply football), being the world's most popular spectator sport, constitutes around 70% of this ever-growing market Constantinou et al. (2012). The last decade has thus seen the emergence of numerous online and offline bookmakers, offering bettors the possibility to place wagers on the results of football matches in more than a hundred different leagues, worldwide. The sports betting industry offers a unique and very popular betting product known as an accumulator bet. In contrast with a single bet, which consists in betting on a single event for a payout equal to the stake (i.e. the sum wagered) multiplied by the odds set by the bookmaker for that event, an accumulator bet combines more than one (and generally less than seven) events into a single wager that pays out only when all individual events are correctly predicted. The payout for a correct accumulator bet is the stake multiplied by the product of the odds of all its constituting wagers. However, if one of these wagers is incorrect, the entire accumulator bet would lose. Thus, this product offers both significantly higher potential payouts and higher risks than single bets, and the large pool of online bookmakers, leagues and, matches that bettors can access nowadays has increased both the complexity of selecting a set of matches to place an accumulator bet on, and the number of opportunities to identify winning combinations. With the rise of sports analytics, a wide variety of statistical models for predicting the outcomes of football matches have been proposed, a good review of which can be found in Langseth (2013).

We consider three modern roles for logic in artificial intelligence, which are based on the theory of tractable Boolean circuits: (1) logic as a basis for computation, (2) logic for learning from a combination of data and knowledge, and (3) logic for reasoning about the behavior of machine learning systems.

Intuitively, locally finiteness means that the refinement operator is computable, completeness means we can generate, by refinement of a, any element of G related to a given element g 1 by the order relation, and properness means that a refinement operator does not generate elements which are equivalent to the element being refined. When a refinement operator is locally finite, complete and proper, we say that it is ideal. Notice that all the subsumption relations presented above satisfy the reflexive 2 and transitive 3 properties. Therefore, the pair (G,), where G is the set of all DLGs given a set of labels L, and is any of the subsumption relations defined above is a quasi-ordered set. Thus, this opens the door to defining refinement operators for DLGs. Intuitively, a downward refinement operator for DLGs will generate refinements of a given DLG by either adding vertices, edges, or by making some of the labels more specific, thus making the graph more specific. In the following subsections, we will introduce a collection of refinement operators for connected DLGs, and discuss their theoretical properties. A summary of these operators is shown in Table 1, where we show that under the object-identity constraint, all the refinement operators presented in this document are ideal. If we do not impose object-identity, then the operators are locally complete and complete, but not proper.

Image classification has become a ubiquitous task. Models trained on good quality data achieve accuracy which in some application domains is already above human-level performance. Unfortunately, real-world data are quite often degenerated by the noise existing in features and/or labels. There are quite many papers that handle the problem of either feature or label noise, separately. However, to the best of our knowledge, this piece of research is the first attempt to address the problem of concurrent occurrence of both types of noise. Basing on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, we experimentally proved that the difference by which committees beat single models increases along with noise level, no matter it is an attribute or label disruption. Thus, it makes ensembles legitimate to be applied to noisy images with noisy labels. The aforementioned committees' advantage over single models is positively correlated with dataset difficulty level as well. We propose three committee selection algorithms that outperform a strong baseline algorithm which relies on an ensemble of individual (nonassociated) best models.

Over this decade, an increasing number of processes is being automated through classification algorithms, being essential that these are robust and reliable if we are to trust key operations based on their output. State-of-the-art classifiers perform extraordinarily well on standard data, but they have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, data instances specifically targeted at fooling the algorithms (Comiter, 2019). As a fundamental hypothesis, algorithms rely on the use of independent and identically distributed (iid) data for both the training and test phases. However, security aspects in classification, which form part of the field of adversarial machine learning (AML), question such hypothesis due to the presence of adversaries ready to modify the data to obtain a benefit and, thus, making both distributions differ. Stemming from the pioneering work in adversarial classification (AC) in Dalvi et al. (2004), the paradigm used to model the confrontation between adversaries and classification systems has been game theory, see recent reviews in Biggio and Roli (2018) and Zhou et al. (2018). As an example, the most popular attacks, including the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) (Goodfellow et al., 2014b), may be viewed from a game-theoretic perspective. Similarly, two of the most promising defence techniques, adversarial training (AT) (Madry et al., 2018), which trains the defender model with attacked samples, and adversarial logit pairing (ALP) (Kannan et al., 2018), which encourages the logits of the model to be the same for both standard and adversarial inputs, may be framed in game theoretic terms. This perspective typically entails common knowledge hypothesis (Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, 2004) which, from a fundamental point of view, are not sustainable in settings such as security, as adversaries try to hide and conceal information. Recent work (Naveiro et al., 2019) presented ACRA, a novel approach for AC based on Adversarial Risk

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been deployed in myriad machine learning applications. However, advances in their accuracy are often achieved with increasingly complex and deep network architectures. These large, deep models are often unsuitable for real-world applications, due to their massive computational cost, high memory bandwidth, and long latency. For example, autonomous driving requires fast inference based on Internet-of-Things (IoT) edge devices operating under run-time energy and memory storage constraints. In such cases, compact DNNs can facilitate deployment due to their reduced energy consumption, memory requirement, and inference latency. Long short-term memories (LSTMs) are a type of recurrent neural network that have also found widespread use in the context of sequential data modeling. They also face a model size vs. accuracy trade-off. In this paper, we review major approaches for automatically synthesizing compact, yet accurate, DNN/LSTM models suitable for real-world applications. We also outline some challenges and future areas of exploration.

Learning disentanglement aims at finding a low dimensional representation, which consists of multiple explanatory and generative factors of the observational data. The framework of variational autoencoder is commonly used to disentangle independent factors from observations. However, in real scenarios, the factors with semantic meanings are not necessarily independent. Instead, there might be an underlying causal structure due to physics laws. We thus propose a new VAE based framework named CausalVAE, which includes causal layers to transform independent factors into causal factors that correspond to causally related concepts in data. We analyze the model identifiabitily of CausalVAE, showing that the generative model learned from the observational data recovers the true one up to a certain degree. Experiments are conducted on various datasets, including synthetic datasets consisting of pictures with multiple causally related objects abstracted from physical world, and a benchmark face dataset CelebA. The results show that the causal representations by CausalVAE are semantically interpretable, and lead to better results on downstream tasks. The new framework allows causal intervention, by which we can intervene any causal concepts to generate artificial data.

We introduce LiPopt, a polynomial optimization framework for computing increasingly tighter upper bounds on the Lipschitz constant of neural networks. The underlying optimization problems boil down to either linear (LP) or semidefinite (SDP) programming. We show how to use the sparse connectivity of a network, to significantly reduce the complexity of computation. This is specially useful for convolutional as well as pruned neural networks. We conduct experiments on networks with random weights as well as networks trained on MNIST, showing that in the particular case of the $\ell_\infty$-Lipschitz constant, our approach yields superior estimates, compared to baselines available in the literature.

Although recent model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of mastering complicated decision-making tasks, the sample complexity of these methods has remained a hurdle to utilizing them in many real-world applications. In this regard, model-based reinforcement learning proposes some remedies. Yet, inherently, model-based methods are more computationally expensive and susceptible to sub-optimality. One reason is that model-generated data are always less accurate than real data, and this often leads to inaccurate transition and reward function models. With the aim to mitigate this problem, this work presents the notion of survival by discussing cases in which the agent's goal is to survive and its analogy to maximizing the expected rewards. To that end, a substitute model for the reward function approximator is introduced that learns to avoid terminal states rather than to maximize accumulated rewards from safe states. Focusing on terminal states, as a small fraction of state-space, reduces the training effort drastically. Next, a model-based reinforcement learning method is proposed (Survive) to train an agent to avoid dangerous states through a safety map model built upon temporal credit assignment in the vicinity of terminal states. Finally, the performance of the presented algorithm is investigated, along with a comparison between the proposed and current methods.