The prosperity of artificial intelligence has aroused intensive interests in intelligent/autonomous navigation, in which path prediction is a key functionality for decision supports, e.g. route planning, collision warning, and traffic regulation. For maritime intelligence, Automatic Identification System (AIS) plays an important role because it recently has been made compulsory for large international commercial vessels and is able to provide nearly real-time information of the vessel. Therefore AIS data based vessel path prediction is a promising way in future maritime intelligence. However, real-world AIS data collected online are just highly irregular trajectory segments (AIS message sequences) from different types of vessels and geographical regions, with possibly very low data quality. So even there are some works studying how to build a path prediction model using historical AIS data, but still, it is a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework to model massive historical AIS trajectory segments for accurate vessel path prediction. Experimental comparisons with existing popular methods are made to validate the proposed approach and results show that our approach could outperform the baseline methods by a wide margin.

Deep learning models have been criticized for their lack of easy interpretation, which undermines confidence in their use for important applications. Nevertheless, they are consistently utilized in many applications, consequential to humans' lives, mostly because of their better performance. Therefore, there is a great need for computational methods that can explain, audit, and debug such models. Here, we use flip points to accomplish these goals for deep learning models with continuous output scores (e.g., computed by softmax), used in social applications. A flip point is any point that lies on the boundary between two output classes: e.g. for a model with a binary yes/no output, a flip point is any input that generates equal scores for "yes" and "no". The flip point closest to a given input is of particular importance because it reveals the least changes in the input that would change a model's classification, and we show that it is the solution to a well-posed optimization problem. Flip points also enable us to systematically study the decision boundaries of a deep learning classifier. The resulting insight into the decision boundaries of a deep model can clearly explain the model's output on the individual-level, via an explanation report that is understandable by non-experts. We also develop a procedure to understand and audit model behavior towards groups of people. Flip points can also be used to alter the decision boundaries in order to improve undesirable behaviors. We demonstrate our methods by investigating several models trained on standard datasets used in social applications of machine learning. We also identify the features that are most responsible for particular classifications and misclassifications.

To make progress in science, we often build abstract representations of physical systems that meaningfully encode information about the systems. The representations learnt by most current machine learning techniques reflect statistical structure present in the training data; however, these methods do not allow us to specify explicit and operationally meaningful requirements on the representation. Here, we present a neural network architecture based on the notion that agents dealing with different aspects of a physical system should be able to communicate relevant information as efficiently as possible to one another. This produces representations that separate different parameters which are useful for making statements about the physical system in different experimental settings. We present examples involving both classical and quantum physics. For instance, our architecture finds a compact representation of an arbitrary two-qubit system that separates local parameters from parameters describing quantum correlations. We further show that this method can be combined with reinforcement learning to enable representation learning within interactive scenarios where agents need to explore experimental settings to identify relevant variables.

The paper presents a comparative study of state-of-the-art approaches for question classification task: Logistic Regression, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) and Quasi-Recurrent Neural Networks (QRNN). All models use pre-trained GLoVe word embeddings and trained on human-labeled data. The best accuracy is achieved using CNN model with five convolutional layers and various kernel sizes stacked in parallel, followed by one fully connected layer. The model reached 90.7% accuracy on TREC 10 test set. All the model architectures in this paper were developed from scratch on PyTorch, in few cases based on reliable open-source implementation.

In this paper we take the common position that AI systems are limited more by the integrity of the data they are learning from than the sophistication of their algorithms, and we take the uncommon position that the solution to achieving better data integrity in the enterprise is not to clean and validate data ex-post-facto whenever needed (the so-called data lake approach to data management, which can lead to data scientists spending 80% of their time cleaning data), but rather to formally and automatically guarantee that data integrity is preserved as it transformed (migrated, integrated, composed, queried, viewed, etc) throughout the enterprise, so that data and programs that depend on that data need not constantly be re-validated for every particular use.

Marine buoys aid in the battle against Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing by detecting fishing vessels in their vicinity. Marine buoys, however, may be disrupted by natural causes and buoy vandalism. To minimize the effects of buoy disruption on a buoy network, we propose a more robust buoy placement using dropout k-means and dropout k-median. We apply dropout k-means and dropout k-median to determine locations for deploying marine buoys in the Gabonese waters near West Africa. We simulated the passage of ships using historical Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, then compared the ship detection probability of dropout k-means to classic k-means and dropout k-median to classic k-median, taking into account that the current sensor detection radius is 10km. With 5 buoys, the buoy arrangement computed by classic k-means, dropout k-means, classic k-median and dropout k-median have ship detection probabilities of 38%, 45%, 48% and 52%.

We consider a learning system based on the conventional multiplicative weight (MW) rule that combines experts' advice to predict a sequence of true outcomes. It is assumed that one of the experts is malicious and aims to impose the maximum loss on the system. The loss of the system is naturally defined to be the aggregate absolute difference between the sequence of predicted outcomes and the true outcomes. We consider this problem under both offline and online settings. In the offline setting where the malicious expert must choose its entire sequence of decisions a priori, we show somewhat surprisingly that a simple greedy policy of always reporting false prediction is asymptotically optimal with an approximation ratio of $1+O(\sqrt{\frac{\ln N}{N}})$, where $N$ is the total number of prediction stages. In particular, we describe a policy that closely resembles the structure of the optimal offline policy. For the online setting where the malicious expert can adaptively make its decisions, we show that the optimal online policy can be efficiently computed by solving a dynamic program in $O(N^2)$. Our results provide a new direction for vulnerability assessment of commonly used learning algorithms to adversarial attacks where the threat is an integral part of the system.

We consider the problem of structure learning for Gaifman models and learn relational features that can be used to derive feature representations from a knowledge base. These relational features are first-order rules that are then partially grounded and counted over local neighborhoods of a Gaifman model to obtain the feature representations. We propose a method for learning these relational features for a Gaifman model by using relational tree distances. Our empirical evaluation on real data sets demonstrates the superiority of our approach over classical rule-learning.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success as a general framework for learning how to make decisions. However, this success relies on the interactive hand-tuning of a reward function by RL experts. On the other hand, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to learn a reward function from readily-obtained human demonstrations. Yet, IRL suffers from two major limitations: 1) reward ambiguity - there are an infinite number of possible reward functions that could explain an expert's demonstration and 2) heterogeneity - human experts adopt varying strategies and preferences, which makes learning from multiple demonstrators difficult due to the common assumption that demonstrators seeks to maximize the same reward. In this work, we propose a method to jointly infer a task goal and humans' strategic preferences via network distillation. This approach enables us to distill a robust task reward (addressing reward ambiguity) and to model each strategy's objective (handling heterogeneity). We demonstrate our algorithm can better recover task reward and strategy rewards and imitate the strategies in two simulated tasks and a real-world table tennis task.

Generative classifiers have been shown promising to detect illegal inputs including adversarial examples and out-of-distribution samples. Supervised Deep Infomax~(SDIM) is a scalable end-to-end framework to learn generative classifiers. In this paper, we propose a modification of SDIM termed SDIM-\emph{logit}. Instead of training generative classifier from scratch, SDIM-\emph{logit} first takes as input the logits produced any given discriminative classifier, and generate logit representations; then a generative classifier is derived by imposing statistical constraints on logit representations. SDIM-\emph{logit} could inherit the performance of the discriminative classifier without loss. SDIM-\emph{logit} incurs a negligible number of additional parameters, and can be efficiently trained with base classifiers fixed. We perform \emph{classification with rejection}, where test samples whose class conditionals are smaller than pre-chosen thresholds will be rejected without predictions. Experiments on illegal inputs, including adversarial examples, samples with common corruptions, and out-of-distribution~(OOD) samples show that allowed to reject a portion of test samples, SDIM-\emph{logit} significantly improves the performance on the left test sets.