Generative models of graphs are well-known, but many existing models are limited in scalability and expressivity. We present a novel sequential graphical variational autoencoder operating directly on graphical representations of data. In our model, the encoding and decoding of a graph as is framed as a sequential deconstruction and construction process, respectively, enabling the the learning of a latent space. Experiments on a cycle dataset show promise, but highlight the need for a relaxation of the distribution over node permutations.

In vivo diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a promising technique to investigate noninvasively the fiber structures of the in vivo human heart. However, signal loss due to motions remains a persistent problem in in vivo cardiac DTI. We propose a novel motion-compensation method for investigating in vivo myocardium structures in DTI with free-breathing acquisitions. The method is based on an invertible Wavelet Scattering achieved by means of Convolutional Neural Network (WSCNN). It consists of first extracting translation-invariant wavelet scattering features from DW images acquired at different trigger delays and then mapping the fused scattering features into motion-compensated spatial DW images by performing an inverse wavelet scattering transform achieved using CNN. The results on both simulated and acquired in vivo cardiac DW images showed that the proposed WSCNN method effectively compensates for motion-induced signal loss and produces in vivo cardiac DW images with better quality and more coherent fiber structures with respect to existing methods, which makes it an interesting method for measuring correctly the diffusion properties of the in vivo human heart in DTI under free breathing.

This paper investigates the intriguing question of whether we can create learning algorithms that automatically generate training data, learning environments, and curricula in order to help AI agents rapidly learn. We show that such algorithms are possible via Generative Teaching Networks (GTNs), a general approach that is, in theory, applicable to supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, although our experiments only focus on the supervised case. GTNs are deep neural networks that generate data and/or training environments that a learner (e.g. a freshly initialized neural network) trains on for a few SGD steps before being tested on a target task. We then differentiate through the entire learning process via meta-gradients to update the GTN parameters to improve performance on the target task. GTNs have the beneficial property that they can theoretically generate any type of data or training environment, making their potential impact large. This paper introduces GTNs, discusses their potential, and showcases that they can substantially accelerate learning. We also demonstrate a practical and exciting application of GTNs: accelerating the evaluation of candidate architectures for neural architecture search (NAS), which is rate-limited by such evaluations, enabling massive speed-ups in NAS. GTN-NAS improves the NAS state of the art, finding higher performing architectures when controlling for the search proposal mechanism. GTN-NAS also is competitive with the overall state of the art approaches, which achieve top performance while using orders of magnitude less computation than typical NAS methods. Speculating forward, GTNs may represent a first step toward the ambitious goal of algorithms that generate their own training data and, in doing so, open a variety of interesting new research questions and directions.

In this paper we present ensembles of classifiers for automated animal audio classification, exploiting different data augmentation techniques for training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The specific animal audio classification problems are i) birds and ii) cat sounds, whose datasets are freely available. We train five different CNNs on the original datasets and on their versions augmented by four augmentation protocols, working on the raw audio signals or their representations as spectrograms. We compared our best approaches with the state of the art, showing that we obtain the best recognition rate on the same datasets, without ad hoc parameter optimization. Our study shows that different CNNs can be trained for the purpose of animal audio classification and that their fusion works better than the stand-alone classifiers. To the best of our knowledge this is the largest study on data augmentation for CNNs in animal audio classification audio datasets using the same set of classifiers and parameters. Our MATLAB code is available at https://github.com/LorisNanni .

In the past few years, generative models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have dramatically advanced our ability to represent and parameterize high-dimensional, non-linear image manifolds. As a result, they have been widely adopted across a variety of applications, ranging from challenging inverse problems like image completion, to being used as a prior in problems such as anomaly detection and adversarial defense. A recurring theme in many of these applications is the notion of projecting an image observation onto the manifold that is inferred by the generator. In this context, Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) has been the most popular approach, which essentially searches for a latent representation with the goal of minimizing discrepancy between a generated image and the given observation. However, PGD is an extremely brittle optimization technique that fails to identify the right projection when the observation is corrupted, even by a small amount. Unfortunately, such corruptions are common in the real world, for example arbitrary images with unknown crops, rotations, missing pixels, or other kinds of distribution shifts requiring a more robust projection technique. In this paper we propose corruption-mimicking, a new strategy that utilizes a surrogate network to approximate the unknown corruption directly at test time, without the need for additional supervision or data augmentation. The proposed projection technique significantly improves the robustness of PGD under a wide variety of corruptions, thereby enabling a more effective use of GANs in real-world applications. More importantly, we show that our approach produces state-of-the-art performance in several GAN-based applications -- anomaly detection, domain adaptation, and adversarial defense, that rely on an accurate projection.

Systems incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly used to guide decision-making in the healthcare sector. While AI-based systems provide powerful and promising results with regard to their classification and prediction accuracy (e.g., in differentiating between different disorders in human gait), most share a central limitation, namely their black-box character. Understanding which features classification models learn, whether they are meaningful and consequently whether their decisions are trustworthy is difficult and often impossible to comprehend. This severely hampers their applicability as decision-support systems in clinical practice. There is a strong need for AI-based systems to provide transparency and justification of predictions, which are necessary also for ethical and legal compliance. As a consequence, in recent years the field of explainable AI (XAI) has gained increasing importance. The primary aim of this article is to investigate whether XAI methods can enhance transparency, explainability and interpretability of predictions in automated clinical gait classification. We utilize a dataset comprising bilateral three-dimensional ground reaction force measurements from 132 patients with different lower-body gait disorders and 62 healthy controls. In our experiments, we included several gait classification tasks, employed a representative set of classification methods, and a well-established XAI method - Layer-wise Relevance Propagation - to explain decisions at the signal (input) level. The presented approach exemplifies how XAI can be used to understand and interpret state-of-the-art ML models trained for gait classification tasks, and shows that the features that are considered relevant for machine learning models can be attributed to meaningful and clinically relevant biomechanical gait characteristics.

Along with the advent of deep neural networks came various methods of exploitation, such as fooling the classifier or co n-taminating its training data. Another such attack is known a s model extraction, where provided API access to some black box neural network, the adversary extracts the underlying model. This is done by querying the model in such a way that the underlying neural network provides enough information to the adversary to be reconstructed. While several works have achieved impressive results with neural network extraction in the propositional domain, this problem has no t yet been considered over the relational domain, where data samples are no longer considered to be independent and identically distributed (iid). Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) ar e a popular deep learning framework to perform machine learning tasks over relational data. In this work, we formalize an instance of GNN extraction, present a solution with preliminary results, and discuss our assumptions and future direc - tions.

The scalability of the labeling process and the attainable quality of labels have become limiting factors for many applications of machine learning. The programmatic creation of labeled datasets via the synthesis of noisy heuristics provides a promising avenue to address this problem. We propose to improve modeling of latent class variables in the programmatic creation of labeled datasets by incorporating pairwise feedback into the process. We discuss the ease with which such pairwise feedback can be obtained or generated in many application domains. Our experiments show that even a small number of sources of pairwise feedback can substantially improve the quality of the posterior estimate of the latent class variable.

Neural architecture search (NAS) aims to discover network architectures with desired properties such as high accuracy or low latency. Recently, differentiable NAS (DNAS) has demonstrated promising results while maintaining a search cost orders of magnitude lower than reinforcement learning (RL) based NAS. However, DNAS models can only optimize differentiable loss functions in search, and they require an accurate differentiable approximation of non-differentiable criteria. In this work, we present UNAS, a unified framework for NAS, that encapsulates recent DNAS and RL-based approaches under one framework. Our framework brings the best of both worlds, and it enables us to search for architectures with both differentiable and non-differentiable criteria in one unified framework while maintaining a low search cost. Further, we introduce a new objective function for search based on the generalization gap that prevents the selection of architectures prone to overfitting. We present extensive experiments on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets and we perform search in two fundamentally different search spaces. We show that UNAS obtains the state-of-the-art average accuracy on all three datasets when compared to the architectures searched in the DARTS space. Moreover, we show that UNAS can find an efficient and accurate architecture in the ProxylessNAS search space, that outperforms existing MobileNetV2 based architectures.

We consider the problem of learning a mixture of linear regressions (MLRs). An MLR is specified by $k$ nonnegative mixing weights $p_1, \ldots, p_k$ summing to $1$, and $k$ unknown regressors $w_1,...,w_k\in\mathbb{R}^d$. A sample from the MLR is drawn by sampling $i$ with probability $p_i$, then outputting $(x, y)$ where $y = \langle x, w_i \rangle + \eta$, where $\eta\sim\mathcal{N}(0,\varsigma^2)$ for noise rate $\varsigma$. Mixtures of linear regressions are a popular generative model and have been studied extensively in machine learning and theoretical computer science. However, all previous algorithms for learning the parameters of an MLR require running time and sample complexity scaling exponentially with $k$. In this paper, we give the first algorithm for learning an MLR that runs in time which is sub-exponential in $k$. Specifically, we give an algorithm which runs in time $\widetilde{O}(d)\cdot\exp(\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{k}))$ and outputs the parameters of the MLR to high accuracy, even in the presence of nontrivial regression noise. We demonstrate a new method that we call "Fourier moment descent" which uses univariate density estimation and low-degree moments of the Fourier transform of suitable univariate projections of the MLR to iteratively refine our estimate of the parameters. To the best of our knowledge, these techniques have never been used in the context of high dimensional distribution learning, and may be of independent interest. We also show that our techniques can be used to give a sub-exponential time algorithm for learning mixtures of hyperplanes, a natural hard instance of the subspace clustering problem.