In the architecture and construction industries, structural design for large buildings has always been laborious, time-consuming, and difficult to optimize. It is an iterative process that involves two steps: analyzing the current structural design by a slow and computationally expensive simulation, and then manually revising the design based on professional experience and rules. In this work, we propose an end-to-end learning pipeline to solve the size design optimization problem, which is to design the optimal cross-sections for columns and beams, given the design objectives and building code as constraints. We pre-train a graph neural network as a surrogate model to not only replace the structural simulation for speed but also use its differentiable nature to provide gradient signals to the other graph neural network for size optimization. Our results show that the pre-trained surrogate model can predict simulation results accurately, and the trained optimization model demonstrates the capability of designing convincing cross-section designs for buildings under various scenarios.

We consider sketched approximate matrix multiplication and ridge regression in the novel setting of localized sketching, where at any given point, only part of the data matrix is available. This corresponds to a block diagonal structure on the sketching matrix. We show that, under mild conditions, block diagonal sketching matrices require only O(stable rank / \epsilon^2) and $O( stat. dim. \epsilon)$ total sample complexity for matrix multiplication and ridge regression, respectively. This matches the state-of-the-art bounds that are obtained using global sketching matrices. The localized nature of sketching considered allows for different parts of the data matrix to be sketched independently and hence is more amenable to computation in distributed and streaming settings and results in a smaller memory and computational footprint.

Deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of recognition/classification tasks. However, when applying deep learning to real-world applications, there are still multiple challenges. A typical challenge is that unknown samples may be fed into the system during the testing phase and traditional deep neural networks will wrongly recognize the unknown sample as one of the known classes. Open set recognition is a potential solution to overcome this problem, where the open set classifier should have the ability to reject unknown samples as well as maintain high classification accuracy on known classes. The variational auto-encoder (VAE) is a popular model to detect unknowns, but it cannot provide discriminative representations for known classification. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Conditional Gaussian Distribution Learning (CGDL), for open set recognition. In addition to detecting unknown samples, this method can also classify known samples by forcing different latent features to approximate different Gaussian models. Meanwhile, to avoid information hidden in the input vanishing in the middle layers, we also adopt the probabilistic ladder architecture to extract high-level abstract features. Experiments on several standard image datasets reveal that the proposed method significantly outperforms the baseline method and achieves new state-of-the-art results.

Deep learning shows great potential for the domain of digital pathology. An automated digital pathology system could serve as a second reader, perform initial triage in large screening studies, or assist in reporting. However, it is expensive to exhaustively annotate large histology image databases, since medical specialists are a scarce resource. In this paper, we apply the semi-supervised teacher-student knowledge distillation technique proposed by Yalniz et al. (2019) to the task of quantifying prognostic features in colorectal cancer. We obtain accuracy improvements through extending this approach to a chain of students, where each student's predictions are used to train the next student i.e. the student becomes the teacher. Using the chain approach, and only 0.5% labelled data (the remaining 99.5% in the unlabelled pool), we match the accuracy of training on 100% labelled data. At lower percentages of labelled data, similar gains in accuracy are seen, allowing some recovery of accuracy even from a poor initial choice of labelled training set. In conclusion, this approach shows promise for reducing the annotation burden, thus increasing the affordability of automated digital pathology systems.

The ability of to explain neural network decisions goes hand in hand with their safe deployment. Several methods have been proposed to highlight features important for a given network decision. However, there is no consensus on how to measure effectiveness of these methods. We propose a new procedure for evaluating explanations. We use it to investigate visual explanations extracted from a range of possible sources in a neural network. We quantify the benefit of combining these sources and challenge a recent appeal for taking bias parameters into account. We support our conclusions with a general assessment of the impact of bias parameters in ImageNet classifiers

We consider the setting of online logistic regression and consider the regret with respect to the l 2 -ball of radius B. It is known (see [Hazan et al., 2014]) that any proper algorithm which has logarithmic regret in the number of samples (denoted n) necessarily suffers an exponential multiplicative constant in B. In this work, we design an efficient improper algorithm that avoids this exponential constant while preserving a logarithmic regret. Indeed, [Foster et al., 2018] showed that the lower bound does not apply to improper algorithms and proposed a strategy based on exponential weights with prohibitive computational complexity. Our new algorithm based on regularized empirical risk minimization with surrogate losses satisfies a regret scaling as O(B log(Bn)) with a per-round time-complexity of order O(d 2).

We consider the problem of data clustering with unidentified feature quality but the existence of small amount of label data. In the first case a sparse clustering method can be employed in order to detect the subgroup of features necessary for clustering and in the second case a semi-supervised method can use the labelled data to create constraints and enhance the clustering solution. In this paper we propose a K-Means inspired algorithm that employs these techniques. We show that the algorithm maintains the high performance of other similar semi-supervised algorthms as well as keeping the ability to identify informative from uninformative features. We examine the performance of the algorithm on real world data sets with unknown features quality as well as a real world data set with a known uninformative feature. We use a series of scenarios with different number and types of constraints.

In decision-making for autonomous vehicles, we need to predict other vehicle's behaviors or learn their behavior implicitly using machine learning. However, often the predictions and learned models have errors or might be wrong altogether which can lead to dangerous situations. Therefore, decision-making algorithms should consider counterfactual reasoning such as: what would happen if the other agents will behave in a certain way? The approach we present in this paper is two-fold: First, during training, we randomly select behavior models from a behavior model pool and assign them to the other vehicles in the scenario, such as more passive or aggressive behavior models. Second, during the application, we derive several virtual worlds from the actual world that have the same initial state. In each of these worlds, we also assign behavior models from the behavior model pool to others. We then evolve these virtual worlds for a defined time-horizon. This enables us to apply counterfactual reasoning by asking what would happen if the actual world evolves as in the virtual world. In uncertain environments, this makes it possible to generate more probable risk estimates and, thus, to enable safer decision-making. We conduct studies using a lane-change scenario that shows the advantages of counterfactual reasoning using learned policies and virtual worlds to estimate their risk and performance.

Being able to infer the goal of people we observe, interact with, or read stories about is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence. A prominent idea in current goal-recognition research is to infer the likelihood of an agent's goal from the estimations of the costs of plans to the different goals the agent might have. Different approaches implement this idea by relying only on handcrafted symbolic representations. Their application to real-world settings is, however, quite limited, mainly because extracting rules for the factors that influence goal-oriented behaviors remains a complicated task. In this paper, we introduce a novel idea of using a symbolic planner to compute plan-cost insights, which augment a deep neural network with an imagination capability, leading to improved goal recognition accuracy in real and synthetic domains compared to a symbolic recognizer or a deep-learning goal recognizer alone.

Real world navigation requires robots to operate in unfamiliar, dynamic environments, sharing spaces with humans. Navigating around humans is especially difficult because it requires predicting their future motion, which can be quite challenging. We propose a novel framework for navigation around humans which combines learning-based perception with model-based optimal control. Specifically, we train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based perception module which maps the robot's visual inputs to a waypoint, or next desired state. This waypoint is then input into planning and control modules which convey the robot safely and efficiently to the goal. To train the CNN we contribute a photo-realistic bench-marking dataset for autonomous robot navigation in the presence of humans. The CNN is trained using supervised learning on images rendered from our photo-realistic dataset. The proposed framework learns to anticipate and react to peoples' motion based only on a monocular RGB image, without explicitly predicting future human motion. Our method generalizes well to unseen buildings and humans in both simulation and real world environments. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that combining model-based control and learning leads to better and more data-efficient navigational behaviors as compared to a purely learning based approach. Videos describing our approach and experiments are available on the project website.