The recent development of online recommender systems has a focus on collaborative ranking from implicit feedback, such as user clicks and purchases. Different from explicit ratings, which reflect graded user preferences, the implicit feedback only generates positive and unobserved labels. While considerable efforts have been made in this direction, the well-known pairwise and listwise approaches have still been limited by various challenges. Specifically, for the pairwise approaches, the assumption of independent pairwise preference is not always held in practice. Also, the listwise approaches cannot efficiently accommodate "ties" due to the precondition of the entire list permutation. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel setwise Bayesian approach for collaborative ranking, namely SetRank, to inherently accommodate the characteristics of implicit feedback in recommender system. Specifically, SetRank aims at maximizing the posterior probability of novel setwise preference comparisons and can be implemented with matrix factorization and neural networks. Meanwhile, we also present the theoretical analysis of SetRank to show that the bound of excess risk can be proportional to $\sqrt{M/N}$, where $M$ and $N$ are the numbers of items and users, respectively. Finally, extensive experiments on four real-world datasets clearly validate the superiority of SetRank compared with various state-of-the-art baselines.

We present an implementation of a probabilistic first-order logic called TensorLog, in which classes of logical queries are compiled into differentiable functions in a neural-network infrastructure such as Tensorflow or Theano. This leads to a close integration of probabilistic logical reasoning with deep-learning infrastructure: in particular, it enables high-performance deep learning frameworks to be used for tuning the parameters of a probabilistic logic. The integration with these frameworks enables use of GPU-based parallel processors for inference and learning, making TensorLog the first highly parallellizable probabilistic logic. Experimental results show that TensorLog scales to problems involving hundreds of thousands of knowledge-base triples and tens of thousands of examples.

Bayesian optimization is a class of data efficient model based algorithms typically focused on global optimization. We consider the more general case where a user is faced with multiple problems that each need to be optimized conditional on a state variable, for example we optimize the location of ambulances conditioned on patient distribution given a range of cities with different patient distributions. Similarity across objectives boosts optimization of each objective in two ways: in modelling by data sharing across objectives, and also in acquisition by quantifying how all objectives benefit from a single point on one objective. For this we propose ConBO, a novel efficient algorithm that is based on a new hybrid Knowledge Gradient method, that outperforms recently published works on synthetic and real world problems, and is easily parallelized to collecting a batch of points.

Conventional relation extraction methods can only identify limited relation classes and not recognize the unseen relation types that have no pre-labeled training data. In this paper, we explore the zero-shot relation extraction to overcome the challenge. The only requisite information about unseen types is the name of their labels. We propose a Parasitic Neural Network (PNN), and it can learn a mapping between the general feature representations of text samples and the distributions of unseen types in a shared semantic space. Experiment results show that our model significantly outperforms others on the unseen relation extraction task and achieves effect improvement more than 20%, when there are not any manual annotations or additional resources.

Fall is a leading cause of death which suffers the elderly and society. Timed Up and Go (TUG) test is a common tool for fall risk assessment. In this paper, we propose a method for predicting TUG score from gait characteristics extracted from video based on computer vision and machine learning technologies. First, 3D pose is estimated from video captured with 2D and 3D cameras during human motion and then a group of gait characteristics are computed from 3D pose series. After that, copula entropy is used to select those characteristics which are mostly associated with TUG score. Finally, the selected characteristics are fed into the predictive models to predict TUG score. Experiments on real world data demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. As a byproduct, the associations between TUG score and several gait characteristics are discovered, which laid the scientific foundation of the proposed method and make the predictive models such built interpretable to clinical users.

In this paper, we present the submitted system for the second DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge from the DKULENOVO team. Our diarization system includes multiple modules, namely voice activity detection (VAD), segmentation, speaker embedding extraction, similarity scoring, clustering, resegmentation and overlap detection. For each module, we explore different techniques to enhance performance. Our final submission employs the ResNet-LSTM based VAD, the Deep ResNet based speaker embedding, the LSTM based similarity scoring and spectral clustering. Variational Bayes (VB) diarization is applied in the resegmentation stage and overlap detection also brings slight improvement. Our proposed system achieves 18.84% DER in Track1 and 27.90% DER in Track2. Although our systems have reduced the DERs by 27.5% and 31.7% relatively against the official baselines, we believe that the diarization task is still very difficult.

The influence of human judgement is ubiquitous in datasets used across the analytics industry, yet humans are known to be sub-optimal decision makers prone to various biases. Analysing biased datasets then leads to biased outcomes of the analysis. Bias by protected characteristics (e.g. race) is of particular interest as it may not only make the output of analytical process sub-optimal, but also illegal. Countering the bias by constraining the analytical outcomes to be fair is problematic because A) fairness lacks a universally accepted definition, while at the same time some definitions are mutually exclusive, and B) the use of optimisation constraints ensuring fairness is incompatible with most analytical pipelines. Both problems are solved by methods which remove bias from the data and returning an altered dataset. This approach aims to not only remove the actual bias variable (e.g. race), but also alter all proxy variables (e.g. postcode) so the bias variable is not detectable from the rest of the data. The advantage of using this approach is that the definition of fairness as a lack of detectable bias in the data (as opposed to the output of analysis) is universal and therefore solves problem (A). Furthermore, as the data is altered to remove bias the problem (B) disappears because the analytical pipelines can remain unchanged. This approach has been adopted by several technical solutions. None of them, however, seems to be satisfactory in terms of ability to remove multivariate, non-linear and non-binary biases. Therefore, in this paper I propose the concept of Fair Adversarial Networks as an easy-to-implement general method for removing bias from data. This paper demonstrates that Fair Adversarial Networks achieve this aim.

Background: Depression has become a major health burden worldwide, and effective detection depression is a great public-health challenge. This Electroencephalography (EEG)-based research is to explore the effective biomarkers for depression recognition. Methods: Resting state EEG data was collected from 24 major depressive patients (MDD) and 29 normal controls using 128 channel HydroCel Geodesic Sensor Net (HCGSN). To better identify depression, we extracted different types of EEG features including linear features, nonlinear features and functional connectivity features phase lagging index (PLI) to comprehensively analyze the EEG signals in patients with MDD. And using different feature selection methods and classifiers to evaluate the optimal feature sets. Results: Functional connectivity feature PLI is superior to the linear features and nonlinear features. And when combining all the types of features to classify MDD patients, we can obtain the highest classification accuracy 82.31% using ReliefF feature selection method and logistic regression (LR) classifier. Analyzing the distribution of optimal feature set, it was found that intrahemispheric connection edges of PLI were much more than the interhemispheric connection edges, and the intrahemispheric connection edges had a significant differences between two groups. Conclusion: Functional connectivity feature PLI plays an important role in depression recognition. Especially, intrahemispheric connection edges of PLI might be an effective biomarker to identify depression. And statistic results suggested that MDD patients might exist functional dysfunction in left hemisphere.

Deep neural networks often consist of a great number of trainable parameters for extracting powerful features from given datasets. On one hand, massive trainable parameters significantly enhance the performance of these deep networks. On the other hand, they bring the problem of over-fitting. To this end, dropout based methods disable some elements in the output feature maps during the training phase for reducing the co-adaptation of neurons. Although the generalization ability of the resulting models can be enhanced by these approaches, the conventional binary dropout is not the optimal solution. Therefore, we investigate the empirical Rademacher complexity related to intermediate layers of deep neural networks and propose a feature distortion method (Disout) for addressing the aforementioned problem. In the training period, randomly selected elements in the feature maps will be replaced with specific values by exploiting the generalization error bound. The superiority of the proposed feature map distortion for producing deep neural network with higher testing performance is analyzed and demonstrated on several benchmark image datasets.

Polygon meshes are an efficient representation of 3D geometry, and are of central importance in computer graphics, robotics and games development. Existing learning-based approaches have avoided the challenges of working with 3D meshes, instead using alternative object representations that are more compatible with neural architectures and training approaches. We present an approach which models the mesh directly, predicting mesh vertices and faces sequentially using a Transformer-based architecture. Our model can condition on a range of inputs, including object classes, voxels, and images, and because the model is probabilistic it can produce samples that capture uncertainty in ambiguous scenarios. We show that the model is capable of producing high-quality, usable meshes, and establish log-likelihood benchmarks for the mesh-modelling task. We also evaluate the conditional models on surface reconstruction metrics against alternative methods, and demonstrate competitive performance despite not training directly on this task.