With the advent of consumer-grade products for presenting an immersive virtual environment (VE), there is a growing interest in utilizing VEs for testing human navigation behavior. However, preparing a VE still requires a high level of technical expertise in computer graphics and virtual reality, posing a significant hurdle to embracing the emerging technology. To address this issue, this paper presents Delayed Feedback based Immersive Navigation Environment (DeFINE), a framework that allows for easy creation and administration of navigation tasks within customizable VEs via intuitive graphical user interfaces and simple settings files. Importantly, DeFINE has a built-in capability to provide performance feedback to participants during an experiment, a feature that is critically missing in other similar frameworks. To demonstrate the usability of DeFINE from both experimentalists' and participants' perspectives, a case study was conducted in which participants navigated to a hidden goal location with feedback that differentially weighted speed and accuracy of their responses. In addition, the participants evaluated DeFINE in terms of its ease of use, required workload, and proneness to induce cybersickness. Results showed that the participants' navigation performance was affected differently by the types of feedback they received, and they rated DeFINE highly in the evaluations, validating DeFINE's architecture for investigating human navigation in VEs. With its rich out-of-the-box functionality and great customizability due to open-source licensing, DeFINE makes VEs significantly more accessible to many researchers.

Dependency parsing (DP) is a task that analyzes text for syntactic structure and relationship between words. DP is widely used to improve natural language processing (NLP) applications in many languages such as English. Previous works on DP are generally applicable to formally written languages. However, they do not apply to informal languages such as the ones used in social networks. Therefore, DP has to be researched and explored with such social network data. In this paper, we explore and identify a DP model that is suitable for Thai social network data. After that, we will identify the appropriate linguistic unit as an input. The result showed that, the transition based model called, improve Elkared dependency parser outperform the others at UAS of 81.42%.

In large-scale classification problems, the data set may be faced with frequent updates, e.g., a small ratio of data is added to or removed from the original data set. In this case, incremental learning, which updates an existing classifier by explicitly modeling the data modification, is more efficient than retraining a new classifier from scratch. Conventional incremental learning algorithms try to solve the problem exactly. However, for some tasks, we are only interested in the lower and upper bound for some values relevant to the coefficient vector of the updated classifier without really solving it, e.g., determining whether we should update the classifier or performing some sensitivity analysis tasks. To deal with these such tasks, we propose an algorithm to make rational inferences about the updated classifier with low computational complexity. Specifically, we present a method to calculate tighter bounds of a general linear score for the updated classifier such that it's more accurate to estimate the range of interest than existing papers. The proposed method can be applied to any linear classifiers with differentiable convex L2 regularization loss function. Both theoretical analysis and experiment results show that the proposed approach is superior to existing methods.

Due to their great performance and scalability properties neural networks have become ubiquitous building blocks of many applications. With the rise of mobile and IoT, these models now are also being increasingly applied in distributed settings, where the owners of the data are separated by limited communication channels and privacy constraints. To address the challenges of these distributed environments, a wide range of training and evaluation schemes have been developed, which require the communication of neural network parametrizations. These novel approaches, which bring the "intelligence to the data" have many advantages over traditional cloud solutions such as privacy-preservation, increased security and device autonomy, communication efficiency and high training speed. This paper gives an overview over the recent advancements and challenges in this new field of research at the intersection of machine learning and communications.

Within the framework of complex system design, it is often necessary to solve mixed variable optimization problems, in which the objective and constraint functions can depend simultaneously on continuous and discrete variables. Additionally, complex system design problems occasionally present a variable-size design space. This results in an optimization problem for which the search space varies dynamically (with respect to both number and type of variables) along the optimization process as a function of the values of specific discrete decision variables. Similarly, the number and type of constraints can vary as well. In this paper, two alternative Bayesian Optimization-based approaches are proposed in order to solve this type of optimization problems. The first one consists in a budget allocation strategy allowing to focus the computational budget on the most promising design sub-spaces. The second approach, instead, is based on the definition of a kernel function allowing to compute the covariance between samples characterized by partially different sets of variables. The results obtained on analytical and engineering related test-cases show a faster and more consistent convergence of both proposed methods with respect to the standard approaches.

Modern meta-learning approaches for image classification rely on increasingly deep networks to achieve state-of-the-art performance, making batch normalization an essential component of meta-learning pipelines. However, the hierarchical nature of the meta-learning setting presents several challenges that can render conventional batch normalization ineffective, giving rise to the need to rethink normalization in this setting. We evaluate a range of approaches to batch normalization for meta-learning scenarios, and develop a novel approach that we call TaskNorm. Experiments on fourteen datasets demonstrate that the choice of batch normalization has a dramatic effect on both classification accuracy and training time for both gradient based and gradient-free meta-learning approaches. Importantly, TaskNorm is found to consistently improve performance. Finally, we provide a set of best practices for normalization that will allow fair comparison of meta-learning algorithms.

Modern machine learning models usually do not extrapolate well, i.e., they often have high prediction errors in the regions of sample space lying far from the training data. In high dimensional spaces detecting out-of-distribution points becomes a non-trivial problem. Thus, uncertainty estimation for model predictions becomes crucial for the successful application of machine learning models in many applications. In this work, we show that increasing the diversity of realizations sampled from a neural network with dropout helps to improve the quality of uncertainty estimation. In a series of experiments on simulated and real-world data, we demonstrate that diversification via determinantal point processes-based sampling allows achieving state-of-the-art results in uncertainty estimation for regression and classification tasks. Importantly, our approach does not require any modification to the models or training procedures, allowing for straightforward application to any deep learning model with dropout layers.

Nondestructive evaluation methods play an important role in ensuring component integrity and safety in many industries. Operator fatigue can play a critical role in the reliability of such methods. This is important for inspecting high value assets or assets with a high consequence of failure, such as aerospace and nuclear components. Recent advances in convolution neural networks can support and automate these inspection efforts. This paper proposes using residual neural networks (ResNets) for real-time detection of pitting and stress corrosion cracking, with a focus on dry storage canisters housing used nuclear fuel. The proposed approach crops nuclear canister images into smaller tiles, trains a ResNet on these tiles, and classifies images as corroded or intact using the per-image count of tiles predicted as corroded by the ResNet. The results demonstrate that such a deep learning approach allows to detect the locus of corrosion cracks via smaller tiles, and at the same time to infer with high accuracy whether an image comes from a corroded canister. Thereby, the proposed approach holds promise to automate and speed up nuclear fuel canister inspections, to minimize inspection costs, and to partially replace human-conducted onsite inspections, thus reducing radiation doses to personnel.

The identification of synthetic routes that end with a desired product has been an inherently time-consuming process that is largely dependent on expert knowledge regarding a limited fraction of the entire reaction space. At present, emerging machine-learning technologies are overturning the process of retrosynthetic planning. The objective of this study is to discover synthetic routes backwardly from a given desired molecule to commercially available compounds. The problem is reduced to a combinatorial optimization task with the solution space subject to the combinatorial complexity of all possible pairs of purchasable reactants. We address this issue within the framework of Bayesian inference and computation. The workflow consists of two steps: a deep neural network is trained that forwardly predicts a product of the given reactants with a high level of accuracy, following which this forward model is inverted into the backward one via Bayes' law of conditional probability. Using the backward model, a diverse set of highly probable reaction sequences ending with a given synthetic target is exhaustively explored using a Monte Carlo search algorithm. The Bayesian retrosynthesis algorithm could successfully rediscover 80.3% and 50.0% of known synthetic routes of single-step and two-step reactions within top-10 accuracy, respectively, thereby outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of the overall accuracy. Remarkably, the Monte Carlo method, which was specifically designed for the presence of diverse multiple routes, often revealed a ranked list of hundreds of reaction routes to the same synthetic target. We investigated the potential applicability of such diverse candidates based on expert knowledge from synthetic organic chemistry.

One common loss function in neural network classification tasks is Categorical Cross Entropy (CCE), which punishes all misclassifications equally. However, classes often have an inherent structure. For instance, classifying an image of a rose as "violet" is better than as "truck". We introduce SimLoss, a drop-in replacement for CCE that incorporates class similarities along with two techniques to construct such matrices from task-specific knowledge. We test SimLoss on Age Estimation and Image Classification and find that it brings significant improvements over CCE on several metrics. SimLoss therefore allows for explicit modeling of background knowledge by simply exchanging the loss function, while keeping the neural network architecture the same. 1 Keywords: Cross Entropy · Class Similarity · Loss Function. Roses are red, violets are blue, both are somehow similar, but the classifier has no clue.