Image interpolation is a special case of image super-resolution, where the low-resolution image is directly down-sampled from its high-resolution counterpart without blurring and noise. Therefore, assumptions adopted in super-resolution models are not valid for image interpolation. To address this problem, we propose a novel image interpolation model based on sparse representation. Two widely used priors including sparsity and nonlocal self-similarity are used as the regularization terms to enhance the stability of interpolation model. Meanwhile, we incorporate the nonlocal linear regression into this model since nonlocal similar patches could provide a better approximation to a given patch. Moreover, we propose a new approach to learn adaptive sub-dictionary online instead of clustering. For each patch, similar patches are grouped to learn adaptive sub-dictionary, generating a more sparse and accurate representation. Finally, the weighted encoding is introduced to suppress tailing of fitting residuals in data fidelity. Abundant experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative measures and visual quality.

Reduced-order models that accurately abstract high fidelity models and enable faster simulation is vital for real-time, model-based diagnosis applications. In this paper, we outline a novel hybrid modeling approach that combines machine learning inspired models and physics-based models to generate reduced-order models from high fidelity models. We are using such models for real-time diagnosis applications. Specifically, we have developed machine learning inspired representations to generate reduced order component models that preserve, in part, the physical interpretation of the original high fidelity component models. To ensure the accuracy, scalability and numerical stability of the learning algorithms when training the reduced-order models we use optimization platforms featuring automatic differentiation. Training data is generated by simulating the high-fidelity model. We showcase our approach in the context of fault diagnosis of a rail switch system. Three new model abstractions whose complexities are two orders of magnitude smaller than the complexity of the high fidelity model, both in the number of equations and simulation time are shown. The numerical experiments and results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed hybrid modeling approach.

In this article, we study a Radio Resource Allocation (RRA) that was formulated as a non-convex optimization problem whose main aim is to maximize the spectral efficiency subject to satisfaction guarantees in multiservice wireless systems. This problem has already been previously investigated in the literature and efficient heuristics have been proposed. However, in order to assess the performance of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms when solving optimization problems in the context of RRA, we revisit that problem and propose a solution based on a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. Specifically, a distributed optimization method based on multi-agent deep RL is developed, where each agent makes its decisions to find a policy by interacting with the local environment, until reaching convergence. Thus, this article focuses on an application of RL and our main proposal consists in a new deep RL based approach to jointly deal with RRA, satisfaction guarantees and Quality of Service (QoS) constraints in multiservice celular networks. Lastly, through computational simulations we compare the state-of-art solutions of the literature with our proposal and we show a near optimal performance of the latter in terms of throughput and outage rate.

Diabetic retinopathy is one of the most threatening complications of diabetes that leads to permanent blindness if left untreated. One of the essential challenges is early detection, which is very important for treatment success. Unfortunately, the exact identification of the diabetic retinopathy stage is notoriously tricky and requires expert human interpretation of fundus images. Simplification of the detection step is crucial and can help millions of people. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been successfully applied in many adjacent subjects, and for diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy itself. However, the high cost of big labeled datasets, as well as inconsistency between different doctors, impede the performance of these methods. In this paper, we propose an automatic deep-learning-based method for stage detection of diabetic retinopathy by single photography of the human fundus. Additionally, we propose the multistage approach to transfer learning, which makes use of similar datasets with different labeling. The presented method can be used as a screening method for early detection of diabetic retinopathy with sensitivity and specificity of 0.99 and is ranked 54 of 2943 competing methods (quadratic weighted kappa score of 0.925466) on APTOS 2019 Blindness Detection Dataset (13000 images).

Recommendation from implicit feedback is a highly challenging task due to the lack of the reliable observed negative data. A popular and effective approach for implicit recommendation is to treat unobserved data as negative but downweight their confidence. Naturally, how to assign confidence weights and how to handle the large number of the unobserved data are two key problems for implicit recommendation models. However, existing methods either pursuit fast learning by manually assigning simple confidence weights, which lacks flexibility and may create empirical bias in evaluating user's preference; or adaptively infer personalized confidence weights but suffer from low efficiency. To achieve both adaptive weights assignment and efficient model learning, we propose a fast adaptively weighted matrix factorization (FAWMF) based on variational auto-encoder. The personalized data confidence weights are adaptively assigned with a parameterized neural network (function) and the network can be inferred from the data. Further, to support fast and stable learning of FAWMF, a new specific batch-based learning algorithm fBGD has been developed, which trains on all feedback data but its complexity is linear to the number of observed data. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed FAWMF and its learning algorithm fBGD.

The ability to learn new concepts with small amounts of data is a crucial aspect of intelligence that has proven challenging for deep learning methods. Meta-learning for few-shot learning offers a potential solution to this problem: by learning to learn across data from many previous tasks, few-shot learning algorithms can discover the structure among tasks to enable fast learning of new tasks. However, a critical challenge in few-shot learning is task ambiguity: even when a powerful prior can be meta-learned from a large number of prior tasks, a small dataset for a new task can simply be very ambiguous to acquire a single model for that task. The Bayesian meta-learning models can naturally resolve this problem by putting a sophisticated prior distribution and let the posterior well regularized through Bayesian decision theory. However, currently known Bayesian meta-learning procedures such as VERSA suffer from the so-called {\it information preference problem}, that is, the posterior distribution is degenerated to one point and is far from the exact one. To address this challenge, we design a novel meta-regularization objective using {\it cyclical annealing schedule} and {\it maximum mean discrepancy} (MMD) criterion. The cyclical annealing schedule is quite effective at avoiding such degenerate solutions. This procedure includes a difficult KL-divergence estimation, but we resolve the issue by employing MMD instead of KL-divergence. The experimental results show that our approach substantially outperforms standard meta-learning algorithms.

The emergence of specialized optimization hardware such as CMOS annealers and adiabatic quantum computers carries the promise of solving hard combinatorial optimization problems more efficiently in hardware. Recent work has focused on formulating different combinatorial optimization problems as Ising models, the core mathematical abstraction used by a large number of these hardware platforms, and evaluating the performance of these models when solved on specialized hardware. An interesting area of application is data mining, where combinatorial optimization problems underlie many core tasks. In this work, we focus on consensus clustering (clustering aggregation), an important combinatorial problem that has received much attention over the last two decades. We present two Ising models for consensus clustering and evaluate them using the Fujitsu Digital Annealer, a quantum-inspired CMOS annealer. Our empirical evaluation shows that our approach outperforms existing techniques and is a promising direction for future research.

Decades of global research and development initiatives such as Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) [2][3] and the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) [4] have demonstrated the ability for both physics-based and data-driven computations to accelerate the discovery and deployment of new alloys. It is established that machine learning (ML) can model process-structure-property relationships of alloys [5][6]. Of equal or greater impact, ML can greatly reduce the number of physics-based experiments and calculations needed to discover and design new materials with optimal properties [7][8][9]. However, the robust prediction of a new alloy and its processing designed to meet a desired, yet not previously achieved performance remains an open challenge; one that is met in this work. In other sects of materials science and engineering where new materials have been successfully predicted, the formulation of effective data descriptors, or "feature engineering," has emerged as a critical data pre-processing step to enable better performances from ML. Most such studies have focused on using high-throughput physics-based calculations together with chemical element descriptors to assist ML prediction [7][9].

This paper attempts to answer the question whether neural network pruning can be used as a tool to achieve differential privacy without losing much data utility. As a first step towards understanding the relationship between neural network pruning and differential privacy, this paper proves that pruning a given layer of the neural network is equivalent to adding a certain amount of differentially private noise to its hidden-layer activations. The paper also presents experimental results to show the practical implications of the theoretical finding and the key parameter values in a simple practical setting. These results show that neural network pruning can be a more effective alternative to adding differentially private noise for neural networks.

We consider the problem of simultaneous estimation of a sequence of dependent parameters that are generated from a hidden Markov model. Based on observing a noise contaminated vector of observations from such a sequence model, we consider simultaneous estimation of all the parameters irrespective of their hidden states under square error loss. We study the roles of statistical shrinkage for improved estimation of these dependent parameters. Being completely agnostic on the distributional properties of the unknown underlying Hidden Markov model, we develop a novel non-parametric shrinkage algorithm. Our proposed method elegantly combines \textit{Tweedie}-based non-parametric shrinkage ideas with efficient estimation of the hidden states under Markovian dependence. Based on extensive numerical experiments, we establish superior performance our our proposed algorithm compared to non-shrinkage based state-of-the-art parametric as well as non-parametric algorithms used in hidden Markov models. We provide decision theoretic properties of our methodology and exhibit its enhanced efficacy over popular shrinkage methods built under independence. We demonstrate the application of our methodology on real-world datasets for analyzing of temporally dependent social and economic indicators such as search trends and unemployment rates as well as estimating spatially dependent Copy Number Variations.